http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/us/01chestnut.html--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October 1, 2008
J.L. Chestnut Jr., Early Leader in Civil Rights Movement, Is Dead at 77
By BRUCE WEBER
J. L. Chestnut Jr., who after attending law school in Washington returned to
his hometown, Selma, Ala., and set up shop in 1958 as the city’s first black
lawyer, and who went on to fight for voting rights for blacks, laying the
groundwork for the march led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from
Selma to Montgomery in March 1965, died Tuesday in Birmingham, Ala. He was
77 and lived in Selma.
The cause was kidney failure after an illness of several months, his
daughter Vivian said.
Long a well-known figure among Alabama lawyers, Mr. Chestnut was an
underpublicized figure in the civil rights movement, a black man who began
his career by taking on the ordinary legal briefs of ordinary black men and
women, daring to work within the white establishment to achieve just ends.
He was a pioneer for blacks in the legal field in Alabama, founding a law
firm, eventually known as Chestnut, Sanders, Sanders & Pettway, that through
the 1990s was the largest black firm in the state.
Among other successes, his firm represented a coalition of black farmers in
Pigford vs. Glickman, in which the claim that the farmers were discriminated
against over a period of decades in programs overseen by the Department of
Agriculture was adjudicated in 1999 and eventually settled, with nearly $1
billion in reparations paid to black farmers through this June.
Known as a clever and mesmerizing speaker with an easy charm in front of a
jury and a flair for drama in a closing argument, Mr. Chestnut was at home
in the courtroom even when the courtroom was an unfriendly place.
“I remember a trial in Jasper, Ala., where a Klansman was being tried for
killing a black man,” one of his law partners, Rose Sanders, said in a
telephone interview on Tuesday. “He was so effective that the judge stopped
the trial, and said, ‘Chestnut, it’s getting dark, and I got to get you on
the road out of town.’ ”
In the early 1960s, as the voting rights movement coalesced around Selma,
Mr. Chestnut’s experience in the local community was invaluable to civil
rights leaders who visited the area. And when demonstrators arrived and were
thrown in jail, it was often as not Mr. Chestnut who got them out.
“I don’t know what would have happened to us in Selma if it wasn’t for
Chestnut,” said Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, who was
jailed and beaten by the Selma police. “Selma was a vicious place, vicious.
I don’t know how he survived there, I really don’t. He used the law to help
liberate the black folk of Alabama. He was a lawyer, but he was also a foot
soldier. He was a brave and courageous man.”
J. L. Chestnut Jr. was born in Selma on Dec. 16, 1930. The initials were his
name; according to his autobiography, “Black in Selma,” written with Julia
Cass, his father was named after a white banker his father’s mother had
admired. J. L. Sr., with his two brothers, owned a grocery; young J. L.’s
mother was an elementary school teacher. J. L. Jr. He attended Selma’s
segregated schools and graduated from Dillard University in New Orleans
before going to law school at Howard University, at a time when the landmark
Brown vs. the Board of Education was being prepared and argued. He moved
back to the South with the belief that that was where the next legal battles
for civil rights would be fought.
In Selma, he told the writer Gay Talese, who met Mr. Chestnut in 1965 and
wrote about him in his 2006 memoir, “A Writer’s Life,” that he decided early
on not to kowtow to judges who disdained him, recalling one instance where a
judge warned him not to be disrespectful to any of the women in his office.
“I have never been disrespectful of a lady in my life,” Mr. Chestnut
replied, “and unlike you, I also respect black women.”
On the other hand, Mr. Chestnut often recalled that before George Wallace
became the segregationist governor of Alabama, he was the one judge who
treated him with respect and insisted that others do so as well.
“Judge George Wallace was the most liberal judge I ever practiced law in
front of,” Mr. Chestnut said in an interview for the public television
documentary “George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire.” “He was the first
judge to call me ‘mister’ in an Alabama courtroom.”
Mr. Chestnut pried dozens if not hundreds of voting rights demonstrators out
of Selma’s jails, and he was present at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7,
1965, a day that became known as Bloody Sunday when the police beat
demonstrators to prevent them from beginning a march to Montgomery. It was
two weeks later that the march, led by Dr. King, was actually completed.
In subsequent years, Mr. Chestnut filed civil rights cases to have blacks
allowed on juries in Dallas County, which includes Selma; to desegregate the
Selma public schools; and to ensure blacks the opportunity to be coaches and
principals in the desegregated schools.
In addition to his daughter Vivian, he is survived by his wife of 56 years,
also named Vivian; two other daughters, Shandra and Gearld; three sons, J.
L. 3rd, Terrance and Gregory; a sister, Johnnie Mae; six grandchildren; and
two great-grandchildren.
“He was a legend down here,” said Michael Jackson, the district attorney for
Dallas County, who is currently the only black district attorney in Alabama.
“As a young attorney, he was the best trial attorney I’d ever seen. I
certainly wouldn’t be in office if it wasn’t for people like him.”
* * *
http://www.selmatimesjournal.com/news/2008/oct/01/remembering-jl-chestnut/Remembering J.L. Chestnut
Published Wednesday, October 1, 2008
“I see my own life as helping to realize the dream in my world in Alabama.
Though I never imagined I’d spend my whole life in little Selma, I don’t
know of any better place I could have taken a stand. Selma is my home. I
love Selma. It’s my life.”
J.L. Chestnut closed his book, co-authored with Julia Cass, with these
words.
On Tuesday morning, Chestnut, known to many of his friends as “Chess,” died
in a hospital in Birmingham. Family members said he had suffered from
various illnesses for a long time.
Many will miss his presence on his radio program — something friends said he
dearly loved to do several times each week. He’d stir the pot with a special
guest or two, then use the time to teach a bit of history of this city he
loved so much.
It is through his voice that so many knew Chestnut.
He gave voice to that history of Selma he knew so well, from the Great
Depression and that time of segregation when black people sat in the
“buzzard roof” of the theater, couldn’t try on clothes in department stores
or went to S.H. Kress because it had the only “colored” bathroom in a
department store.
He gave voice to those during the Jim Crow era that were voiceless by going
to law school at Howard University in Washington, D.C. and returning home
two years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down school segregation with
the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. For years, Chestnut was Selma’s
first and only black attorney.
He was present by the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday in 1965. The
event, he said, became his turning point as it did for many black Americans
after the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
Chestnut was a student of power and how it affected blacks and whites in the
South. He analyzed it and worked to give voice to blacks and whites that had
none in that power struggle.
He was not always appreciated or liked by some — the downside of living life
as an advocate. Chestnut did not mince words. He did not suffer fools
lightly. He believed Selma progressed from confrontation, and Chestnut was
not afraid to be confrontational when he felt it was needed. His life, even
to the end, was a struggle.
He spoke of himself as much as he did of Martin Luther King Jr. when he
observed the struggle for equal rights more than a generation after the
Voting Rights Act passed.
“We are far from the world envisioned by King in his ‘I Have a Dream’
speech,” Chestnut wrote. “We are closer to it, but getting there will
continue to be a struggle. People forgot that King said near the end of that
speech, ‘I [now] go back to the South’ — meaning to implement the dream of
freedom and justice for all by marches, boycotts, and other means the
establishment detested. I see King, at the expense of his life, striving to
realize the dream, not just pleasantly dreaming.”
