Career Beginnings and Racial Realities

Feeling somewhat lost and confused, I got a job tending bar, studied for and passed the bar exam, and got married all in my first six months back in Atlanta. To say that law firms were not exactly knocking down my door offering employment is an understatement, so, being a nascent entrepreneur, I rented office space in a restored Victorian in the no-longer-hip and not-yet-chic midtown, and hung a shingle. Who knew that a resume from a middling law school combined with experience researching Black Panther appeals was not the pathway to lucrative job opportunities in the American South? 

I did have one skill that was marketable: I was an excellent softball player, or at least  had been. I was a skilled pitcher and an even better third baseman who could hit for a high average and with some power. While trying to find clients for my nascent law firm I made money moonlighting behind a dark and dank neighborhood bar in a nondescript shopping mall in northeast Atlanta, not far from Emory University. Late one night, as luck would have it, an old college teammate came in for a drink, and after a few minutes catching up asked me if I’d be interested in playing third base for his team in the lawyer’s league. 

I missed the competition. I hadn’t played since quitting my last team mid-season in San Francisco two years earlier. One of the ex-Panthers had hooked me up with a highly competitive fast-pitch squad in the Western Edition, one of the remaining low income neighborhoods in rapidly gentrifying San Francisco. They took their softball seriously in the ‘hood. Games were heavily attended by passionate followers, as well as neighborhood folks just looking for a party. 

I was the only white boy on the team, and one of only four or five in the entire league. The games were rough and fights were not uncommon; fights between players on opposing teams, fights between fans and players, and fights between the fans themselves. Just a normal night under the lights. I had managed to stay above the fray for a few months, usually just remaining on the pitcher’s mound or in the dugout while altercations took place, until the police showed up to make the necessary arrests. 

I knew little of my teammates, though some spoke occasionally of missing games due to appointments with their parole agents. In one game shortly before I took a permanent leave of absence, when I was a little wild, my catcher came out, and motioning to the increasingly restless home crowd milling around behind the dugout, asked if I understood that the surly sounds I was hearing were directed at me, and that the chant of, “Hey hey shout shout, if we don’t win you don’t get out,” might not necessarily be targeting their opponents. I got the message, buckled down, and retired the side. 

The following week as I prepared to warm up, I was introduced to a new catcher who  told me that he would be my battery mate for the time being. I inquired about the previous catcher. He informed me that Curtis would likely not be back - for at least the next twenty years. It seemed that after last week’s game he had come home to find his lady in bed with a friend. He had shot both dead and set fire to the apartment. Not the brightest bulb on the tree, I realized at this point that I was out of my league, and left after that night’s game, not to return. 

So when my old teammate asked me to join the team, I jumped at the opportunity. The games were enjoyable, the competition among the lawyers intense, and I quickly discovered that summer clerkships for the white shoe firms were often awarded based not on law school grades, but college batting averages. There were numerous ex-Georgia and Georgia Tech athletes, with a few more from ‘Bama, Auburn, and Clemson. There was even an ex-New York Yankee first baseman recently out of the major leagues. 

In addition to the contests themselves, the after-game drinks were a great opportunity to network. One night David Paul, one of my teammates, a large, doleful, and slovenly phlegmatic pitcher who smoked vomit-inducing cigars incessantly - even while on the mound - was mentioning that he had a pile of workers’ compensation cases that he wanted to unload. He did high-end seven-figure litigation and these cases, valued in the tens of thousands, did not fit his business model of complex litigation. Sensing a business opportunity, I immediately volunteered that I did workers’ comp cases, though I’d never actually seen one and had no idea what they entailed. I agreed to meet Paul at his offices on Saturday morning to discuss a possible collaboration. The meeting went well, and we quickly struck a deal in which I would litigate the cases and pay Paul twenty-five percent of whatever I earned. 

I studied hard, took a bar course in workers' compensation law, and began discovery. The deal worked well for us both. I made enough to cover the overhead at my new office as well as pay myself a small salary. I paid Paul enough to keep the cases coming. A year on, I received an unexpected call from Paul, who asked me to meet him for lunch at the Pleasant Peasant, one of the more upscale Atlanta eating establishments. Over lunch, Paul, former editor of the Yale Law Journal, one of Atlanta’s top ten lawyers under forty, and take-no-prisoners litigator, had a proposal. He was forming a new firm with the notorious civil trial attorney Jimmy Bob Jackson that would focus on civil rights, environmental suits, products liability, and medical malpractice. 

Jackson was a legend in civil rights circles in the South, being the only white lawyer in a firm that included the Chair of the Fulton County Commission. Jimmy Bob had grown up in Youngstown, Ohio as the son of a United Steelworker shop steward, going by his birth name of James Robert right through his undergraduate days at Case Western and then at Stanford Law, where he headed the law review and finished at the top of his class. After a clerkship at the Fifth Circuit, James Robert met a lovely young southern beauty, decided to make Atlanta home, and in a feat of brilliant marketing morphed into Jimmy Bob Jackson, who promptly sued and beat the State of Georgia and numerous federal agencies for Voting Rights Act violations too numerous to mention. He did so well regularly stomping the Georgia Attorney General’s Office that they put him on retainer. I would be Jackson and Paul’s first associate, paid a small salary as well as a percentage of settlement proceeds. I accepted without hesitation. 

The firm would provide a litigation boot camp. The hours were long and grueling, the research tedious, and the learning curve steep. Paul and Jackson had cases from Georgia to California, Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and Maryland, mostly in Federal court. I traveled the country signing up clients, taking depositions, and arguing preliminary motions. The firm beat Eli Lilly for drug practice liability, A.H. Robins for a defective birth control device, Exxon for contaminating a drinking water supply serving a black community in Alabama, as well as Union Carbide, Ford, State Farm, and many more. 

I was lucky enough through all this to have fantastic secretarial support from a young woman I had been able to bring over from my personal practice. Katey Trumble, my support staff from Early County, deep in the heart of southwest Georgia and hard on the Alabama line, ran my very complicated life. A beautiful nineteen-year-old with a Mae West figure, Katey was the daughter of a south Georgia Highway Patrolman, with racial attitudes that were common in those parts. She had moved to the big city for college. The fact that many of my clients were black did not seem to bother her, though at lunch one day one of those racial slurs, common to the red dirt flatlands of rural Georgia slipped, and I was forced to reprimand her severely and let it be known that if it happened again I would have no choice but to let her go. She swore she meant nothing by it and that she understood. I took her at her word and life continued as before. 

However, I had an ace up my sleeve. Blake Briggsby,  my law school roommate in San Francisco, who still lived in the Bay Area, had risen to an executive position with Bank Of America and traveled regularly. He would soon be visiting Atlanta. Briggs, originally from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, possessed a deep and resonant baritone, the diction of an Oxford don, and a speaking cadence that belonged on the national news. Only after imbibing several adult beverages, when “floor” became “flo’” and “door” became “do’” could one ever ascertain his southern African American church background. 

Coop warned Briggsby of my secretary’s less than enlightened attitudes on race, and Briggs, rather than being offended, took this as a challenge. He called regularly, and every time Katey answered Briggs would chat her up. Briggs was charming, and Katey had recently been dumped by her redneck hump of a boyfriend in the weeks before Briggs was due to arrive in town on business. Briggs had a free Thursday night, while I was working late on a morning deposition. I asked Katey if she’d like to be Briggs's date for the night. She was surprised and flattered, but unsure as to why this gentleman would be interested. I told her that Briggs was on an expense account, thought she was charming, and would be honored if she would join him. Katey was nervous and flattered at the invite. 

Briggs picked her up in his rented Mercedes sedan for dinner at The Abbey, a beautiful restaurant located in an old restored church in downtown Atlanta - the priciest and classiest place in the city. He arrived on time, nattily attired in his bespoke slate-gray Armani suit with a stark white shirt highlighting his dark complexion, and a red silk pocket square completing the executive attire. Tall and black, with an elegant, neatly trimmed goatee, Briggs had class written from head to Italian loafers. After he introduced himself to Katey, she calmly and professionally asked him to wait at the reception desk while she went to inform me of his arrival.

Upon entering my office, she gently closed the door. When I looked up she was barely controlling herself, muttering every curse word she knew. I asked what the problem was. Seething with anger, she said, “Your friend is here.” I peered over my glasses, smiled, and asked her to bring him in. 

“I’d like to say hello before you two kids go out on the town.” At this point she nearly lost it. 

“I can’t go out with him,” she hissed. 

Continuing to play dumb, I tried to look incredulous, and asked, “Why not? He made reservations at The Abbey. Sounds like a fun night. I promise that he’s a total gentleman, and has more class in his little finger than that low-life trailer trash loser you are so broken up over has in his whole body.” 

“You know why I cannot!,” she barked. “You with your twisted New York sense of humor thought you and that -” and there she stopped herself, hesitated and then said, “San Francisco friend of yours would just have a great laugh over your hick secretary.” 

Now I got serious. “Ms Trumble,  if you don’t want to go out with Mr. Briggsby, just go back there and tell him. Make up some half-baked excuse, or tell him the pretty damn obvious truth, which is that your sorry, narrow-minded little cracker ass is not willing to even consider the possibility that, despite his perceived racial infirmity, Mr. Briggsby might very well be a nice guy and a fabulous date.”

She thought about it for a second, pacing the floor. Finally, much more softly, she said, “yew know ah cannot tell him thaat. it would be impolaht. And you would nevah fogive me for disrespectin your friend.” 

“So it’s settled,” I said. “Have a great time,” I added as I returned to work.

Later that night, Briggs called and reported that they’d had an enjoyable evening. Dinner was fabulous and they followed it by clubbing past midnight. Briggs had taken her home, ended the evening with a polite kiss on the cheek, and made plans for them to do it again next time he was in Atlanta. 

The next morning I arrived at the office to find Katey sitting on the couch sobbing, with tears smudging eyeliner all down her face. Having been a lawyer for only a few years, I was not totally without human compassion. And the fact that all this emotion was being poured out in my office would make it difficult to ignore. 

“What’s the matter?” I asked. She sobbed silently for a second, composed herself, and then blurted, 

“It’s your friend Briggsby!” 

I was a little taken aback. Briggs had reported a lovely first date. “Briggs told me you guys had a great time. You even went clubbing after dinner. Why the tears?”

“That’s just it,” she sobbed, “Ah haad the best tahm I ever haad on a date in mah lahf. He is funny, smart, and verry kahnd. He was interested in what ah said and actually listened to me. And a complete gentleman. The boys ah go out with are always tra-in to git in mah pants or at the very least under mah blouse. He could not have been more respectful. What a wonderful man! And he asked me out agin. And ah said yes!”

I  was now totally confused. “If it was so wonderful then what’s the problem? Why the tears?”

Now she stopped crying, wiped away the tears and the smeared make-up with tissues I provided, stood up, and while slowly pacing back and forth told me much more about her background than I knew. 

I knew her dad was a sheriff deputy in Early County in southwest Georgia, and that she had grown up outside the county seat of Blakely. Beyond that, I knew little about her background or that region of the state. She proceeded to fill in the blanks with a little history of her hometown.

In the period from 1877 to 1950, Early County had twenty-four documented lynchings of  African Americans, the second-highest total in the state after the more densely populated Fulton County. Most were committed around the turn of the twentieth century, in the period of Jim Crow and suppression of black voting. This was still a largely agricultural area, and some disputes arose from confrontations between black sharecroppers or tenant farmers and white landowners, particularly at times when accounts required settling.

A mass lynching took place in the county on December 30, 1915, when seven black men were killed. The county had a fraught racial history to this day, and the police were at the center of the problem. Blacks and whites did not mix, and the schools remained segregated if not legally, then socially. She told me that as a little girl, her father had on several occasions bragged about shooting “niggers” and twice brought her to his office and proudly showed photos of “black S.O.Bs” he had shot for “disrespecting white women.” Yet he was her father, and she loved him dearly. 

“Do you understand, Mr. Cooper, that until last naht ah had nevah spoken to a black man with above a hah school education and rarely one who had even finished hah school.” 

“When ah see black men on the street in Atlanta ah do as ah was taught bah mah da-ddy. Ah cross the street. Ah look away. Ah know they dress better here th-an at home, but ah nevah gave it much thought. Ah realized half way through last night that so much of what daddy taught me was so wrong and how much growin ah still have to do.” 

I stood up, gave her a big hug, and she went back to her desk. I realized that I still had an incomplete understanding of the nature of race relations - not just in the South, not just in the US, but everywhere. People feared what was different. Prejudice was passed on from parent to child. If everyone could have an experience like Katey, the world would be a far kinder place. But that was impossible. This was one in a series of experiences over the next few years that would lead me in a different direction. One thing was becoming abundantly clear however, and that was that I had no clue how to unring the bell of prejudice, or even how to start. Those lessons passed down from generation to generation were hardwired. It would take extraordinary experiences and special people like Katey and Briggs to work through those changes. And that there was little the law could do to make the necessary changes in peoples’ hearts.

Katey and Briggs went out several more times over the next two years, becoming friends as each moved on to serious relationships. Briggs would settle down two years later with a lovely wife in Marin County. After finishing school, Katey married a fellow student in Atlanta - a black man from Nigeria. I lost touch with her over the years, but  last I heard, she was the proud mother of two young biracial sons. Her daddy must be so proud.