By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 9, 2009
Charles "Chuck" Morgan Jr., 78, a civil rights lawyer who challenged the racist society of his native South and won numerous landmark cases for equal rights before the U.S. Supreme Court, died Jan. 8 at his home in Destin, Fla. He had Alzheimer's disease.
In a career full of significant cases, Mr. Morgan's most important might have been the "one-man, one-vote" ruling he won in 1964 from the Supreme Court. The case, Reynolds v. Sims, forced the Alabama legislature to create districts that were equal in population, giving black voters a better chance to elect candidates.
He also forced Alabama to integrate its prisons, successfully challenged the Southern practice of barring women and blacks from jury duty, and represented Julian Bond when the Georgia General Assembly tried to prevent the newly elected legislator from taking his seat after he spoke out against the Vietnam War.
"He was one of the most important people" in civil rights litigation, said Bond, now the chairman of the NAACP's national board. "He did in the South through the courts what Martin Luther King did in the streets."
The Reynolds case "ended gerrymandering," said Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. "It was one of the seminal cases in the march for voting rights in this country and was the death knell for voting discrimination in the South. Chuck's work in voting rights cases and jury discrimination cases changed the landscape of the South completely."
Mr. Morgan, who opened the American Civil Liberties Union's Atlanta office in 1964 and became legislative director of the ACLU's national office in Washington in 1972, defended some of the most controversial cases of the 1960s and 1970s. He successfully appealed to the Supreme Court the draft evasion conviction of heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, who opposed the Vietnam War on religious grounds.
Mr. Morgan also represented a number of military clients, including an Army physician who refused to train Vietnam-bound Green Berets. He sued to desegregate his alma mater, the University of Alabama, unsuccessfully sued to overturn the 1966 Georgia gubernatorial election and successfully forced a new election in Greene County, Ala., that led to the 1969 election of six black candidates for local offices.
"I love the Constitution, I love the law, and I have no dislike at all for Southern rednecks, some of my ancestors having been among them," Mr. Morgan told the New Yorker magazine in 1969.
In 1977, he left the ACLU to go into private practice. The lawyer who sued over the federal wiretapping of liberals and led an early movement to impeach President Richard M. Nixon astounded his friends by representing former attorney general John N. Mitchell in an unsuccessful attempt to shorten his prison term. He also represented the Tobacco Institute in a fight against a municipal ordinance banning smoking in public places and corporate clients accused of discrimination.
Mr. Morgan unsuccessfully defended before the Supreme Court an influential Atlanta law firm that promoted male associates faster than female associates. But he won a series of major cases for Sears, Roebuck and Co. over allegations of race and sex discrimination brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
"There was no question in my mind but that Sears, for most of its history, had done more for black Americans than the Federal Government. And there's no question that Sears today, with its affirmative action programs, far surpasses all the liberal organizations that I know anything about," he told the New York Times in 1983, dubbing his critics "ideologues frozen in time."
Years earlier, when he was critical of black separatists and criticized by some for not adhering to liberal norms, he quoted a friend's reply to a would-be seductress: "Madam, I shall not alter the pattern of a lifetime for your momentary convenience."
He was born March 11, 1930, in Cincinnati, and his family moved to Kentucky when he was an infant. He later moved to Birmingham, Ala., and graduated from the University of Alabama, where he also received a law degree in 1955.
Early in his career, he publicly deplored racial injustice and represented indigent blacks for free in his spare time from his practice at a corporate law firm in Birmingham. Then, in September 1963, the day after four young black girls died in the firebombing of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Mr. Morgan took the podium at the Young Men's Business Club.
"We are a mass of intolerance and bigotry, and stand indicted before our young," he said. "We are cursed by the failure of each of us to accept responsibility, by our defense of an already dead institution. . . . Every person in this community who has in any way contributed during the past several years to the popularity of hatred is at least as guilty as the demented fool who threw the bomb. . . .
"Who did it? Who threw that bomb? The answer should be, 'We all did it.' "
The community reaction was swift and brutal. Crosses were burned on his lawn, polite society shunned him and he received multiple anonymous death threats. He eventually moved his family out of the city.
He had worked briefly for the NAACP and the American Association of University Professors before joining the ACLU in 1964.
In his prime, he was described as a man who "looks like an Alabama sheriff" because he was overweight, smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and his voice carried the sound of the Deep South.
He closed his law office in Washington in 1992 and retired to Destin.
He wrote "A Time to Speak" (1964) about his early years and "One Man, One Voice" (1979) about his experiences from 1964 to 1976.
Survivors include his wife of 55 years, Camille Walpole Morgan of Destin; a son, Charles Morgan III of Destin; and four grandchildren.