Ex-D.C. Counsel Payton to Lead Rights Legal Fund

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund yesterday announced the appointment of John Payton, a veteran civil rights lawyer and former District corporation counsel, as its next director-counsel and president.

Payton will replace Theodore M. Shaw, who informed the board in May that he would resign after more than three years on the job. Payton was selected by a board vote on Tuesday and is scheduled to start in March.

"The one thing that's humbling about the job are the huge footsteps of the people who were in it before you," said Payton, who follows former Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights icons who led the organization.

"I went to law school to deal with the issues of social change and racial justice," Payton said in an interview. "The opportunity to go to the premier law firm that does this kind of work -- my goodness -- is irresistible."

The defense fund was founded in 1940 to provide legal assistance to poor African Americans. Its role broadened to working on key civil rights issues, such as the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, the 1962 fight to make James Meredith the first black student to attend the University of Mississippi, and the 1982 renewal of the Voting Rights Act. The fund was separated from the NAACP for tax reasons in 1957.

Vernon E. Jordan, a Washington lawyer and adviser to President Bill Clinton, called Payton "a first-class lawyer" who is committed "to the cause of equal justice." Harvard Law School professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr. said the appointment "is the best news I have heard concerning the civil rights movement in years."

In 1993, Payton was nominated by Clinton to be assistant attorney general for civil rights, with responsibility for enforcing the Voting Rights Act. Payton, however, withdrew after political support evaporated, particularly among the Congressional Black Caucus. Payton acknowledged that he had not voted for 16 years, and caucus members said at the time that he was noncommittal when asked if the Voting Rights Act allowed for the creation of majority-black districts that helped elect them.

Payton, a Los Angeles native, started litigating civil rights cases after graduating from Harvard Law School in 1977. In 1982 he helped argue NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware before the Supreme Court, a case that threatened to bankrupt the nation's oldest civil rights organization.

Claiborne Hardware sought damages for lost business over a picket and boycott the NAACP organized. The court ruled that the nonviolent protest was a protected form of speech.

Payton fought South African apartheid in the 1980s. He was the District's corporate counsel for three years, ending in 1994, and helped argue the 2003 University of Michigan affirmative action case before the Supreme Court.