Michael Meltsner

ISBN:  0-8139-2501-0

The following review was contributed by:  *Sue Vogan:  To read more of Sue's reviews Click Here

Michael Meltsner claims that he “applied to law school because it postponed the need to decide anything, because it would keep me out of the armed services for at least a year, and because, broke and fatherless, I couldn’t turn my back on the full-tuition scholarship Yale offered me.” He didn’t seem to have a clue about being a lawyer, but states, “at the time the only difference I could see between me and the vast majority of my classmates was that I had to find an underdog to fight for.” He found "underdogs" and he admits that he “learned on the job.”

Meltsner finds a “battered old box” in his basement. He has come across it before, but it isn’t until now that he investigates its contents. What he discovers inside he compares to finding “the Dead Sea scrolls.” It’s a treasure, documenting his father’s struggles with employment during the Great Depression. What Ira D. Meltsner’s son found was “a drowning man begging for help.”

His father’s “work took him inside large corporations, where he persuaded top management to embark on sizeable promotional campaigns using the calendars, ashtrays, desk paraphernalia, and what in the trade they called novelties...” Ira, “for most of his adult life was reoccupied with supporting a family.” However, there was more substance to this man, father of a future civil rights lawyer. “He frequently distributed to neighbors the contents of a closet full of anti-Klan pamphlets, warnings of neo-Nazi conspiracies, and picture books touting the joys of brotherhood -- black, brown, and white children holding hands; Christian and Jew in joint worship under “one God.” But he would never acknowledge, much less discuss, any personal dimension of bigotry.”

Michael Meltsner recalls a “brawl” in his early childhood that came after he was called “a Christ killer.” His father explained that this was “The Depression” and “the Irish kid who sucker-punched you probably had a father who had to explain why he was fired.” He went on to offer; “maybe he took it out on the Jews.” The Depression caused poverty, but, at the same time, didn’t cause Ira to be poor in the humanity area.

It was the 1960’s. A year after Michael Meltsner graduated from law school, he “accepted an offer from Thurgood Marshall, then director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. -- variously called LDF, the Legal Defense Fund, the Fund, or Inc.” The pay was “$6,000.00.” Meltsner was “shocked.” It was a “lordly sum” and all for “doing work he wanted to do.” He goes on to explain, “the primary reason to be a lawyer, I believed, was to fight injustice, but I also lusted after the action and esteem of defeating the bad guys and arguing before the federal courts.” What he found was there was a great deal more to learn and it would be OJT, or on-the-job-training. “After a few years at LDF,” Meltsner confesses, “I had come down to earth, landing in a world I could not have imagined. Big cases and argument of important points of law would lie ahead, but I was now linked to people who were in turn linked to me at the intersection of some fundamental beliefs and values.” The beliefs included that everyone was created equal under the law and the values, well, I believe he learned these from Ira.

In the Epilogue, Meltsner writes, “LDF and other organizations that focused on civil rights are still coping with some of the same basic frustrations that emerged after the passage of the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts -- getting past a focus on antidiscrimination litigation to find effective interventions that move toward greater economic and educational equality.” Katrina happens after Meltsner delivers “The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer” manuscript. There were, as we are aware, many issues that gave the nation pause with regards to the aftermath of Katrina -- including “the rediscovery of the thousands of poor -- mostly the black poor -- left unaided and unassisted in the floodwaters of New Orleans. Almost immediately, old arguments over how to treat poverty erupted.”

With the Katrina crisis ever present in our minds, Meltsner offers this ray of hope, “crisis often force upon us shifts in understanding and that there is in this set of dramatically unsettling events an opportunity for a civil rights movement to reform and reconstitute itself and the society it once served so well.”

This is much more than a memoir of a civil rights lawyer. It’s a powerful inside look at the time in history that segregation and unrest because of the discrimination was just coming to a head; when it was almost unheard of for a white man, much less a lawyer, to be working for “Negroes.” The language may have changed, laws may have been established, and segregation is illegal -- then why is there still a sense of division?

“The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer” is a must read for all -- black, brown, white, yellow, or red. After reading Michael Meltsner’s magnum opus, I believe that it is with a greater shift in understanding and more opportunities that reform will come -- one day. And if I ever needed a civil rights lawyer, I would hope that he or she would be exactly like Michael Meltsner.