Mike Trister NMRLS 50th Anniversary Speech Transcript

FROM THE LAW SCHOOL TO THE COMMUNITY:

THE EARLY YEARS OF NORTH MISSISSIPPI RURAL LEGAL SERVICES (1966-70)

Michael B. Trister[1]

Thank you very much. It is a pleasure to be back in Oxford after all these years, especially for an occasion as significant as this one. Believe me, there were many times when no one would have believed that NMRLS would ever celebrate a fifth anniversary, let alone a fiftieth— certainly not the members of the Mississippi bar and political establishment who fought so hard to make us go away, and not even those of us who worked in the program during its early years.

I am going to talk about how North Mississippi Rural Legal Services (NMRLS) came to be and how and why it evolved in its first few years, particularly how the program came to leave the University’s sponsorship, and the federal case and investigations that followed. The events I will describe all took place during the years 1966 through 1970.

The OEO Grant to the School of Law

The legal services program, then known as Lafayette County Legal Services, was established in 1966 as one of the earliest legal programs funded as part of the War on Poverty by the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). The program was the brainchild of Joshua Morse, who had become the Dean of the University of Mississippi School of Law a few years earlier and saw the program as one way to add badly needed financial resources to support the School’s academic growth. Structurally, the program was administered as part of the University through the School of Law.

When I, along with several of my Yale Law School classmates from the class of 1966, joined the Law School faculty that Fall, the program was operating as a hybrid of what we would later come to call a judicare program, using private attorneys from the Oxford bar who were paid to represent indigent clients, and a clinical program, using law students to assist those lawyers. Aaron Condon had been hired as the first Executive Director of the program, a job he performed while also serving on the faculty. There were no staff attorneys or paralegals, only two social workers, Sally Thames, the wife of a law student, and Diane Zimberoff, the wife of a graduate student, who worked out of a small office just off the square in Oxford.

Since the program was slow in getting started and had few cases in its early months, in the summer of 1966 program funds were used to pay  stipends to a group of students from the School of Law who were given clerkships in legal services programs throughout the United States. Samuel M. Davis, who later became Dean of the School of Law, has written in the Mississippi Law Journal that his experience that summer “opened my eyes to the world beyond my provincial upbringing.”[2] Upon his return, Davis became one of the first law students to participate in the clinical element of the program.

Staffing Up, Expansion to Marshall County, Controversial Lawsuits

Because the program was part of the University, there was no board of directors or other body to evaluate whether it was meeting the needs of the local community. Under pressure from OEO, Dean Morse agreed to appoint an advisory committee made up primarily of faculty to oversee the program’s activities.

In the summer of 1967, Luther McDougal, a native Mississippian who had been on the advisory committee, agreed to take over as Executive Director, and under an agreement with Dean Morse, I started to work for the program, while continuing to teach part-time at the School of Law. Part of my responsibility included teaching a seminar on poverty law for the law students who participated in the clinical program. In addition, the social workers and I started what we called a community worker program, modeled on the pioneering work of the Dixwell Legal Rights Association in New Haven, which hired and trained local citizens to act as advocates for their neighbors in matters involving the public assistance and other government programs. Annie Burt, Mary Gordon, and Lena Wiley were part of the first group of community workers in Lafayette County.

Fall 1967 also saw the opening of a new office on the square across from the courthouse in Holly Springs, under the name Marshall County Legal Services, initially staffed by Stanley Taylor, who had grown up in Crosby,

Mississippi, graduated from Tulane Law School, and was part of the first

Reginald Heber Smith Fellowship class funded by OEO through the University of Pennsylvania. John Maxey, from New Albany, Mississippi became the second staff attorney in the Holly Springs office after he graduated from the School of Law in January, 1968. Henry Boyd directed the community workers who were hired when that program expanded to Marshall County.

Marshall County was chosen as the location for the new office because of its large, indigent population and the presence of a Head Start program at Rust College that provided us with ready access into the client community. There also was a growing grassroots movement, then, I believe, called Marshall County Citizens for Progress, that was beginning to raise a range of social issues as part of an effort to elect Black candidates who for the first time ran for a number of county-wide offices in 1967.

One of the important issues raised during this campaign was the announcement by the Marshall County Board of Supervisors that the County was going to discontinue the federal food stamp program for low-income families at the beginning of 1968. I particularly remember a Citizens for Progress meeting in late November, 1967, chaired by Alfred “Skip” Robinson who had run unsuccessfully for County Sheriff. Skip asked me during the meeting what the group could do to force the Supervisors to change their decision concerning the food stamp program. I replied that the organization could start a petition drive to have the question placed on the ballot at the next regular election, although, in truth, at that time I was not even sure if such a procedure existed under Mississippi law. The subsequent petition campaign provided an opportunity for the Citizens for Progress group to continue their organizing efforts in the Black community and ultimately led to a favorable decision of the Mississippi Supreme Court, Gill v. Woods,[3] after the Board of Supervisors refused to order an election in response to the submission of the appropriate number of signed petitions.

In the summer of 1968, Bill Joyner and Robert Kelly became the first staff attorneys in the Oxford office, after their graduation from the School of Law, and they later opened a satellite office in Batesville. The use of staff attorneys to provide program services was not well received by the private bar in Lafayette and Marshall Counties, since they had accepted the program when it was established, albeit grudgingly, primarily because of the fees they could receive from the program for handling cases.

More controversial in terms of the future of the program were two federal actions filed by the program’s staff attorneys during early 1968. The first was a school desegregation case filed in federal court by John Maxey and Stan Taylor on behalf of Black parents in Holly Springs and Marshall County.[4] Since there was no Mississippi state agency with authority over local school districts that could be sued in a single, statewide desegregation action, as in other Southern states such as Georgia and Alabama, the more than 150 school districts in Mississippi each had to be sued separately by the Department of Justice or the civil rights attorneys in Jackson. Neither of these had the resources to sue every district, leaving places such as Marshall County and many other counties in the northern part of the state without desegregated schools more than ten years after Brown v. Board of Education.[5]

The second case brought by the program involved a constitutional, right-to-travel challenge to the state’s one-year residence requirement before indigent families could become eligible for what was then known as the AFDC – Aid to Families with Dependent Children – welfare program. Similar challenges had been brought by legal services programs in other states, usually in places where there was a concern on the part of the state that families would move to the state to receive higher welfare benefits. No one, for certain, was moving to Mississippi to receive welfare benefits, which were then the lowest in the nation, but our community workers had a client who had returned to be with her family in Mississippi after living for a period of time out of state, and so we filed a federal case on her behalf. The case was successful, and our position was ultimately upheld by the US Supreme Court in one of its first welfare rights cases, Shapiro v. Thompson.[6]

Political Pressure; Moving to Mary Holmes College

The program’s original grant expired in January,1968, but it was extended while an application for renewal was being considered. In February, OEO sent a letter of intent to renew the grant at approximately $300,000 through March 31, 1969. However, the paperwork for the renewal was never completed. Instead, during the Spring of 1968, while the program’s application for renewal was pending, Dean Morse came under intense pressure resulting from the two federal lawsuits as well as the alleged involvement of program attorneys and other staff in civil rights activities in Marshall County. In April, the Mississippi Senate Committee on Universities and Colleges, chaired by William E. Corr of Panola County, held a hearing in Jackson at which Dean Morse, Porter Fortune, the recently appointed University Chancellor, and Dr. E. R. Jobe, executive secretary of the Board of Trustees of Institutions of Higher Learning, were called to testify about our activities. A report prepared later by the American Association of University Professors, based on a transcript of the hearing, later found that “much of the questioning was designed to discredit the Legal Services project so as to induce the university to stop sponsoring it.”[7] Threats were made to move the School of Law to Jackson, and to enact a prohibition on any state employee suing an agency of the state; and a state audit of the Law School’s finances was ordered.

As it became clear that the University would likely discontinue its involvement with the legal services program, Luther McDougal and I approached Mary Holmes Junior College in West Point about becoming the program’s sponsor. Having another institution of higher education as the sponsor was absolutely critical because under the Economic Opportunity Act community action and legal services projects sponsored by colleges and universities were exempt from the statutory provision allowing the Governor to veto any such project carried out within a state. To avoid a Governor’s veto, Mary Holmes was already sponsoring the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), a Head Start program that had come under attack by Mississippi Senators John Stennis and James O. Eastland, and the College agreed to take us in when, at the end of May 1968, Chancellor Fortune instructed Dean Morse not to apply for a renewal of the program.

Our ability to keep the program alive through Mary Holmes College caught the politicians off guard after they learned that our proposal would be funded by OEO. The Acting Director of the Southeastern regional office of the legal services program in 1968, a professor from Emory Law School who had just assumed his position, subsequently wrote a file memorandum titled “My Summer in Mississippi,” in which he described the numerous calls made by the offices of Governor John Bell Williams, Senator Stennis, and other officials demanding that Mary Holmes not be funded. The Mississippi State Bar Association, which had until then showed no interest whatever in meeting the legal needs of the poor, put together a competing proposal for a statewide judicare program which it claimed would provide more and better service to the client community, but this was rejected by OEO and we were refunded effective July 1, 1968, under the new name of North Mississippi Rural Legal Services to reflect our plans of growing into more counties.

Suing The University

Having failed in their attempts to defund or replace the program, the Governor and his collaborators in the legislature and State Bar had one last quiver in their bow. Relying on a 1966 policy adopted by the Board of Trustees of Institutions of Higher Learning, which authorized members of the

University faculty to engage in outside employment provided that, inter alia, “it does not bring discredit to the institution and that it does not bring the employee into antagonism with his colleagues, community, or the State of Mississippi…,” the University advised Luther McDougal, George Strickler, another faculty member who was working with the program, and me that, while we could return to the faculty on a full-time basis, we could no longer work part time for the legal services program while remaining on the faculty.

Luther McDougal agreed to return to the faculty, on the condition that he could remain as Chair of the NMRLS board on a volunteer basis, where he was joined by John Robin Bradley, another faculty member. George Strickler and I, however, refused to accept the University’s terms and were instructed to leave our Law School offices and University housing on short notice. On July 30, 1968, we filed a civil rights action in federal court challenging our forced dismissal as unconstitutional, represented by attorneys from the Lawyer’s Constitutional Defense Committee. The case, known as Trister v. University of Mississippi only because I won a coin flip with George to determine whose name would come first in the complaint, was tried before Hon. Orma Smith, a very recent appointee to the Northern District bench, in late August. At the conclusion of the trial, Judge Smith issued an opinion finding that our rights had not been violated because there was evidence that our continuing to work for NMRLS would have an adverse impact on the quality of instruction received by law students.[8]

Other developments that ultimately proved significant took place while our appeal was pending in the Fifth Circuit. During his testimony before the Mississippi Senate Committee in April, Dean Morse had unsuccessfully warned that any legislative interference aimed at defunding the legal services program could have adverse consequences for the school’s accreditation. Responding to our complaints, the American Association of Law Schools (AALS), one of two national law school accrediting bodies, at its annual meeting in December 1968 voted to open an investigation into the circumstances surrounding our departure from the School of Law and the defunding of the legal services program.

An AALS investigating committee made up of the Deans of the

University of Virginia School of Law and the University of Georgia School of Law visited the University in May, 1969. While the Committee initially equivocated on whether our constitutional rights had been violated, that position became moot when the Fifth Circuit on October 9, 1969, reversed the district court’s ruling in a split (2-1) decision rejecting the idea that our work for NMRLS would interfere with our teaching and finding that “the only reason for making a decision adverse to appellants was that they wished to continue to represent clients who tended to be unpopular. This is a distinction that cannot be constitutionally upheld.”[9]

Subsequent to the 5th circuit decision, the Committee on Academic

Freedom and Tenure of the AALS issued a report finding that the

Association’s rules had been violated, and the full membership of the Association voted at its 1969 Annual Meeting to accept the Committee’s recommendation that the School’s accreditation should be suspended following a hearing in which the School of Law would be allowed to contest this decision.

Before this hearing took place, Dean William Bunkley, who had replaced Dean Morse when he left in 1969 to become the Dean at Florida State Law School, offered George Strickler and me the opportunity to teach a course at the School of Law, which I accepted in the Spring semester of 1970. I believe A.C. Wharton, who later became Mayor of Memphis, Tennessee, was enrolled in that class on employment discrimination law.

Expansion to West Point and Greenwood

In 1969, funds were provided to open additional NMRLS offices in West Point and Greenwood.  West Point was staffed by Jesse Pennington, who had just graduated from Howard Law, and Tom Royals and Tom Mayfield, who had worked for NMRLS as students in the School of Law.  Greenwood was staffed by Alix Sanders who returned to his hometown immediately after his own graduation.

During this period, under the direction of Kent Spriggs, NMRLS

expanded its school desegregation docket with suits against a large number of school districts in the northern part of the state, including in Oxford, and we began filing employment discrimination cases on behalf of Black citizens who were turned away from employment at factories in the area. While we are here today mostly to remember the lawyers and other employees of NMRLS over the years, these cases remind us that it was the clients who served as plaintiffs who took the biggest risks and without whom no cases would have been brought.

One of the plaintiffs I remember the best was Jewell Madlock of Sardis, who, after title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 took effect, piled a number of her friends into her car and went from segregated plant to segregated plant trying to apply for jobs. After they were turned down without being allowed to even submit applications, she filed a number of complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that later became the basis for title VII lawsuits brought by the Jackson office of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, NMRLS and the EEOC itself. These cases eventually opened up jobs for our clients at US Industries in Batesville, Sardis Luggage, and Chromcraft Corporation, amongst others.

It was also in this period that NMRLS represented a group of students from Mississippi Valley State College who had been arrested when they protested conditions on campus. Wilhelm Joseph who was a student leader and later became Executive Director of NMRLS was involved in these protests.

Another major event involved the protests by Black students at the University during a concert by a group known as Up With People. And it was during this same year that at the instance of the Mississippi State Bar Association NMRLS attorney John Brittain was arrested for practicing law without a license.

Finally, I would like to mention another case that further illustrates the role of NMRLS in trying to ensure that Mississippi’s programs for poor people complied with federal requirements. When the Medicaid program to provide health care to low-income people was enacted in 1965, states initially had the option of whether to participate. Even though most of the funding for the program was provided by the federal government, the Mississippi legislature refused to establish the program until 1969, when it became mandatory under federal law. However, the legislature limited eligibility only to those welfare recipients whom it believed it had no choice but to include. Thus, in the case of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the state provided health benefits for the dependent children but refused to provide them for the children’s mothers, grandmothers and other caretakers. With the assistance of Rims Barber, an organizer for the Delta Ministry who was one of the state’s strongest advocates for the poor, we brought a class action in federal court in 1969 alleging that the exclusion of the caretaker relatives violated the Social Security Act, and in 1971, Judge Orma Smith ruled that we were correct.[10] The State later reported that more than 27,000 poor adults were added to the program as a result of the suit, a victory worth millions of dollars in medical care each year.

Conclusion

Dean Joshua Morse and the faculty of the School of Law deserve lasting credit for their courage and vision in bringing the legal services program to the School of Law only four years after the University itself had to be desegregated by federal authority acting with the support of federal troops. Morse and the faculty were also far ahead of their time in recognizing the value of clinical legal education. In the years since that first OEO grant to the School of Law, clinics today have become a recognized and important component of the academic programs at virtually every law school.

However, I believe the separation of NMRLS from the University of Mississippi School of Law was inevitable, given the state’s political climate in the 1960s and the University’s own recent history. With the benefit of hindsight, no organization devoted aggressively to seeking change to the racially charged social and economic policies still prevalent in Mississippi at that time could expect to thrive if it was subject to the control of the state legislature, the Governor, and other public officials and institutions.

In moving to Mary Holmes College, NMRLS took an important step not only towards continuing the program’s ability to serve the tremendous legal needs of the poorest people within the nation’s poorest state, but in making clear that the services provided could not be shackled by interference from even the most powerful political forces within the state. This fight for independence continued well beyond these early years.

[1] This is the manuscript of a presentation on April 22, 2016, by Michael B. Trister, the first Executive Director of North Mississippi Rural Legal Services, at NMRLS’ 50^th anniversary celebration’s Historic Litigation Conference, and is published posthumously. The video of the presentation is available on the NMLRS YouTube channel,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAGXEp4-0TU.

[2] Samuel M. Davis, A Tribute to My Dean, Joshua M. Morse, III, 82 Miss. L. J., no. 7, 2013, at 2.

[3] 226 So. 2d 912 (Miss. 1969).

[4] Anthony v. Marshall County Board of Education, 409 F.2d 1287 (5^th Cir. 1969).

[5] 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

[6] 394 U.S. 618 (1969).  The NMRLS case was Jackson v. Winstead.  It never went to trial.

[7] Academic Freedom and Tenure: University of Mississippi, 56 AAUP Bull. 75 (1970).

[8] Judge Smith’s opinion is unpublished.

[9] Trister v. University of Mississippi, 420 F.2d 499, 504 (1969).

[10] Triplett v. Cobb, 331 F. Supp. 652 (N.D. Miss. 1971).