Remembering a civil rights icon

John Payton, who died last week at 65, was the president and counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund — and recognized in the legal profession as one of the most important lawyers to fight for civil rights cases.

The most recent was in 2003, when he triumphed before the Supreme Court on the matter of affirmative action in higher education. He is said to have brought an argument of such eloquence and brilliance that Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas became mute with bitter reverence.

I met Payton in 1968 while teaching at the Claremont Colleges, about an hour outside of Los Angeles. Payton was an intellectual, among the most impressive students I met. His basic intelligence allowed him to move with ease through the overwhelmingly white campus.

Payton was always an organizer and, when the loud horn of racial solidarity was blown, he joined the black student movement on campus, fought for the admission of more black students and brought reason to what was then an irrational movement. It was a period when many students were attracted to and seduced by the African attire of cultural nationalism, or the fatigues of those who considered themselves revolutionaries. Power to the people.

It was not long before Payton understood how rhetorically exciting such talk could be, but how futile it actually was. He once said, “People might have fun calling white boys sissies and whatnot, but they had better realize that many of them are the same kind we saw during World War II, which was no joke. Those white guys came from little towns all over this country and took Omaha Beach; they fought like hell for the Union during the Civil War.

“The military can make soldiers out of whatever it has, and it will whenever necessary. I don’t see them running scared from Huey Newton and the Black Panthers. Changing policy, or influencing it, is the only way to an ac- tual revolution in this country. That’s the way I’m going.”

Payton went on, after graduation, to become a recruiter of socalled minorities, helping conceive and execute a pre-freshman program for incoming black students. While they may have had high grades on paper, they were no more than C’s and D’s when compared to the better white high schools. He believed, and was right, that the black students needed instruction that prepared them for college so that they would begin with enough morale to carry them through when the going got rough. “We learn by doing!” he would say. He went on to Harvard Law School and then became a corporate lawyer, one who was so skilled that a businessman told me, “He could vaporize the opposition.”

Shortly thereafter, he became interested in helping end apartheid in South Africa. He met his second and last wife, Gay Mcdougall, a remarkable lawyer and fund-raiser in her own right.

Risking their lives, they worked there during the first election in which blacks were allowed to vote. Both were among those told up front that neither of them might come out alive. It was no joke — Africa has never been.

It was quite logical that a man of his singularity and superior intelligence decided to become an intellectual descendant of Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, two of the finest lawyers in the history of this nation. That both were black was good for black people, but beyond that, they were the sort who were good for the nation as a whole.

In his own quiet and witty way, John Payton was one of them — and will remain what he was as long as people keep track of the actual heroes of the age.