St. John Barrett, civil rights lawyer, dies at 89

St. John Barrett was often away from home when his five children were young. He didn’t tell them where he was going or say much about the work he did.

It took years before they learned that, during the height of the civil rights movement, their father was traveling throughout the South, helping to define a new branch of the law and attempting to bring an end to segregation.

Beginning in 1955, when he came to Washington, Barrett was one of the first civil rights lawyers in the government. He was part of the Justice Department’s new Civil Rights Division when it was created in 1957 and had a major role in many celebrated legal landmarks, including the desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High School in the 1950s, James Meredith’s enrollment as the first African American student at the University of Mississippi and to the integration of interstate buses by the Freedom Riders of the early 1960s.

Barrett, who was 89 when he died May 28 at Howard County General Hospital of pneumonia, seldom made headlines on his own. But for more than a decade, he was at the forefront of perhaps the most momentous movement for social change in the nation’s history.

“He made an enormous impact as a government lawyer in enforcing the civil rights laws,” John Doar, the top lawyer in the Civil Rights Division in the 1960s and the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom last month, said in interview. “I had such confidence in him. I felt he had a much better grasp of civil rights law than I did.”

Barrett was an assistant district attorney in Oakland, Calif., when a former colleague invited him to join the Justice Department. Civil rights law was still in its infancy. In 1957, Barrett worked alongside Thurgood Marshall — who later became the first African American justice of the U.S. Supreme Court — on the case in Little Rock in which the governor used the National Guard to prevent the school from integrating.

Often, however, Barrett was on his own, exploring a new legal field with few precedents. Armed with little more than the force of law and sheer moral courage, he performed much of his work in the face of intimidation, anger and fear.

St. John Barrett was born May 23, 1923, in Santa Rosa, Calif., where his father was a lawyer. The younger Barrett — whose first name derived from his mother’s maiden name — grew to be a lanky 6-foot-4 and was known from an early age as “Slim.”

He graduated from Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., in 1943. A bout with meningitis kept him out of the military during World War II, and he worked as an engineer at an aircraft plant in Santa Monica, Calif. He graduated from law school at the University of California at Berkeley in 1948.

When he traveled overseas in 1951, Barrett carried with him a letter of introduction from Earl Warren, the governor of California, who became chief justice of the Supreme Court in 1953. Both men were Republicans and had worked as prosecutors in Alameda County, Calif.

At the Justice Department, Barrett handled voting rights and school desegregation cases — including an infamous episode in Virginia, where Prince Edward County officials closed the public schools for five years rather than comply with an order to desegregate.

Although he said he never felt in personal danger, Bar- rett was a firsthand witness to how the racial order of the South was enforced by violence.

In 1963, Barrett handled the case of Fannie Lou Hamer, a 45-year-old civil rights worker who had been arrested with another black woman in Winona, Miss. In jail, the women were forced to lie on their stomachs, raise their dresses and endure a savage beating with a lead pipe wrapped in leather.

Days later, they appeared at Barrett’s office in Washington. “They could barely walk,” he wrote in his memoir. They brought their blood-soaked underclothes with them in plastic bags.

Barrett arranged with the FBI to have the women’s injuries photographed. He included the pictures and the underwear as evidence when he drafted a complaint charging the sheriff with depriving the women of due process of law.

Barrett left the Justice Department in 1967 to become deputy general counsel at the old Department of Health, Education and Welfare. He went into private practice in 1977 and retired in 2002. He moved from Chevy Chase to Silver Spring, Md., and, last year, to Ellicott City, Md.