Lawyer made case for civil rights
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 travelling throughout the American 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 enrolment as the first African-American student at the University of Mississippi and in the integration of interstate buses by the Freedom Riders of the early 1960s.
Barrett, who was 89 when he died on May 28 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 United States 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, said last month in an 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, California, 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 US 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. He performed much of his work in the face of intimidation, anger and fear.