Civil Rights Lawyer J.L. Chestnut Jr., 77

J.L. Chestnut Jr., 77, the first black lawyer in Selma, Ala., and an attorney for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the city's landmark protest marches of the early 1960s, died Sept. 30 at St. Vincent's Hospital in Birmingham.

A law partner, state Sen. Hank Sanders of Selma, said Mr. Chestnut's kidneys began to fail because of an infection following surgery

Mr. Chestnut, who remained a major figure in efforts to secure voting rights for black residents of Alabama, was the local lawyer whom King and other civil rights leaders depended on to fight harassing injunctions, bail demonstrators out of jail and serve as an intermediary between them and city leaders.

Mr. Chestnut was at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, which became known as Bloody Sunday after police beat demonstrators to keep them from beginning a march to Montgomery, the state capital.

The march was a signal moment in the civil rights struggle. Captured on national television, the Bloody Sunday incident spurred widespread revulsion. The Selma event galvanized congressional support that August to pass the Voting Rights Act to prohibit racial discrimination in balloting.

Mr. Chestnut spent the next four decades working to ensure that voting rights for black Americans translated into political power and influence, locally and beyond.

He defended black residents in major voting fraud prosecutions brought by the Justice Department in west Alabama in the 1980s. More recently, he was the lead attorney in a class-action lawsuit, Pigford v. Glickman, that black farmers filed against the U.S. Agriculture Department for denying them subsidies and other assistance because of race.

A federal judge approved a settlement of the case in 2000, with nearly $1 billion in reparations paid to black farmers so far. Mr. Chestnut also led the appeals for more than 60,000 farmers who were denied compensation in the settlement.

"He was just an indomitable advocate for black people, whether it was getting them to vote, getting them on juries, desegregating the schools [and] getting black people to run for office," said Julia Cass, a former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter who co-wrote Mr. Chestnut's autobiography, "Black in Selma: The Uncommon Life of J.L. Chestnut" (1990).

By the 1990s, Mr. Chestnut's firm, Chestnut, Sanders, Sanders & Pettaway, was the largest black law firm in Alabama.

J.L. Chestnut Jr. was born in Selma on Dec. 16, 1930. The initials stood for the name of a white banker his father's family admired. His father co-owned a grocery store until IRS agents forced him out of business because of unpaid taxes. His mother was an elementary school teacher.

He was a saxophone player in his youth and was vividly exposed to the inequalities of how the races lived when he performed at a whites-only country club in Selma.