On June 21, 1963, President John F. Kennedy brought nearly 250 lawyers to the White House to ask what they intended to do about the civil rights crisis.
Ten days earlier, the president had delivered a historic address in response to Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s decision to defy court orders to open the University of Alabama to Black students. He framed the fight for civil rights as not only a constitutional and legal imperative but also a moral one.
“Kennedy called down a lot of the lawyers when desegregations were being challenged in the South, and the Southern governments were attacking the judges, and he said, ‘Why is it that I’m the person speaking out on behalf of these judges? Where is the bar?’” says longtime ABA leader Walter White, who notes that the meeting inspired a new course for the association.
Several past and future ABA presidents and members were part of the conversation with Kennedy. Among them were future ABA presidents Orison Marden and Jerome Shestack, who helped create the Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities, which later became the Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice. The section was officially established at the ABA Annual Meeting in 1966 to lead the association and the legal profession in protecting and advancing civil rights and civil liberties.
For the past 60 years, the section has done just that. Known as the “conscience” of the ABA, it remains the only membership entity in the association that is solely devoted to civil rights, human rights, civil liberties and social justice. It fulfills its mission by promoting through advocacy and education a multitude of crucial issues, including racial equality, gender equity and LGBTQ+ rights.
In the current political and social climate, this work has never been more important, says Mario Sullivan, the current chair of the section, which this year has the theme “Stronger Together, We Endure, We Prevail.”
“We’re back almost at square one, fighting for some of the same rights that we fought very diligently for over the last 60 years,” Sullivan says. “But my focus has been on showing people that we did it once, and we can do it again.”
Peter Langrock joined the ABA a year after graduating from the University of Chicago Law School in 1960, and at that time, he says it was a mostly all-white, all-male association.
It wasn’t much better five years later, he adds, when he heard about the new Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities.
“My mentor from law school, Soia Mentschikoff, a member of the founding council, said, ‘This section is where the action is going to be,’” says Langrock, a trial lawyer from Vermont. “She was right.”
Langrock, who was one of the section’s charter members, recalls the council was a small group composed of “first-rate senior lawyers with national accreditation and a bunch of young lawyers who later had remarkable careers.”
Among the section’s organizers were Jefferson Fordham, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School; Erwin Griswold, the dean of Harvard Law School who later was the U.S. solicitor general; and Nicholas Katzenbach, the U.S. deputy attorney general and later the attorney general. Fordham became the section’s first chair.
Those who helped get the fledgling group off the ground were Mentschikoff, the first woman to teach at Harvard’s and the University of Chicago’s law schools; Shestack, a human rights lawyer; and Louis Pollak, the dean of Yale Law School who went on to become a federal judge.
Carole Bellows, another early member of the section, also notes the significance of younger lawyers who were active. They included future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and civil rights lawyer William Coleman, who became the second Black man to hold a cabinet position when he became U.S. transportation secretary.
“There were women, there were African Americans who never would have belonged to the ABA because they were excluded. There were academics,” says Bellows, a longtime judge in Illinois’ Cook County and the first female president of the Illinois State Bar Association. “I mean, it was incredible. At that time, it was earth-shattering.”
Bellows adds that the section’s mission, and even its proposed name, shook up the association. When other members questioned its sole focus on individual rights, its leaders agreed to add “responsibilities” to the moniker.
The policy work of the Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities quickly stood apart in the ABA.
“The section led the House of Delegates by pushing the ABA agenda on civil rights,” Langrock says. “It was the only section that had an agenda that was more than a trade organization. As time went on, other sections became more sympathetic.”
The section’s first resolution honored the centennial of the ratification of the 14th Amendment, according to White, who served as the section’s chair in 1998-99.
The 1968 measure “called on the association to reaffirm the fundamental principle that lawyers, as individuals and members of an organized legal profession, have a responsibility to ensure the equal rights of all citizens as contemplated by the Constitution,” White wrote in a Human Rights magazine article marking the section’s 50th anniversary.
Among its other initial resolutions, the section proposed a measure in 1972 that condemned discriminatory hiring practices in the legal profession on the basis of sex, religion, race or national origin. That same year, it introduced resolutions supporting ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and calling on law firms and law schools to stop discriminating against women. In 1975, it urged implementation of Title IX of the Education Amendments Act.
In the early 1980s, the section supported related issues, including amendments to the Civil Rights Act to prohibit sex discrimination in public accommodations; a later resolution supported including in the definition of public accommodation any private club that derived most of its income from business sources.
“This was part of the long-range goals of the section to bring about gender equity, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a leader in this effort both in and out of the section,” says Langrock, who served as the section’s chair beginning in 1980-81.
The House adopted all these measures, despite some initial battles between members of the Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities and other groups in the ABA, Langrock also says.
The section had tackled another controversial topic in 1978 when it successfully urged the House to adopt a resolution supporting federal and state legislation to finance abortion services for indigent women. Estelle Rogers wasn’t a member then but took up the mantle of abortion rights when she joined in the late 1980s.
As vice-chair of the section’s women’s rights committee, Rogers asked the ABA to file an amicus brief in Webster v.
Reproductive Health Services, a case in which the Supreme Court eventually upheld a Missouri law that imposed restrictions on abortion. After the association declined because it didn’t have a policy on abortion, Rogers helped create one.
“That began an almost three-year saga of the ABA adopting a policy, [which happened] somewhat to the surprise of many in 1990,” says Rogers, who worked mostly on women’s rights issues as a consultant in Washington, D.C. “It was reversed at the annual meeting in 1990, and then we got it back in 1992.”
The resolution, which supported the right of a woman to terminate a pregnancy prior to fetal viability or to protect her health or life, “has been a sore point,” says Rogers, who later worked for the American Civil Liberties Union Reproductive Freedom Project.
“There were resignations [from the ABA] over it,” she says. “But I’m sure there were women who joined because of it.”
Through the decades, the Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities expanded its advocacy efforts to protect people who were LGBTQ+, had disabilities or were economically disadvantaged. It has addressed discrimination in death penalty cases, the treatment of people with HIV/AIDS and the rights of immigrants.
Among many other pressing matters, the section also has advocated for Native American concerns, environmental justice and religious freedom.
“One of the things that has happened over the years is that the lion’s share of I think probably of all resolutions in a given meeting, but certainly of anything that really captures anybody’s imagination, are filed by the section,” says Rogers, who was an active member of the House for 27 years.
Bellows remembers presenting one of the first gay rights resolutions to the House when she was chair of the section in 1976. Its aim was to prohibit “discrimination on the basis of homosexuality,” she says.
“The first motion was to table it immediately, because ‘gay rights were not germane to the purposes of the American Bar Association,’” Bellows says. “What followed was a riotous House meeting, and a very contentious debate, and it was tabled.”
The House finally passed a similar resolution nearly 15 years later. Then came a series of resolutions aimed at protecting other LGBTQ+ rights, including those related to adoption, custody and visitation, and marriage equality, says Mark Agrast, who began working on these issues with the section in 1990.
To him, marriage equality was the most significant. In 2004, the section sponsored a resolution that opposed any federal law that would keep states from determining who could enter a civil marriage.
In 2010, it brought another measure that urged governments to eliminate all legal barriers to civil marriage for same-sex couples.
Five years later, the Supreme Court held in Obergefell v. Hodges that the 14th Amendment requires states to recognize same-sex marriage.
“The section’s best contribution of all has been to continue to raise issues that are sometimes uncomfortable—maybe often uncomfortable—until they’re not, until they are mainstream,” says Agrast, who was chair of the section in 2002-2003.
The advocacy work in the section reverberates through the country because once the ABA adopts policy, its leaders can testify in support of related legislation on Capitol Hill or file amicus briefs in Supreme Court and other appellate court cases, Agrast says.
Agrast says the section also inspired the inception of other ABA entities, including the Commission on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, which he helped establish in 2007.
“Despite the fact that it’s a relatively small section, it’s punched above its weight throughout its existence, and it’s really been inspiring to be a part of it,” says Agrast, whose career includes having served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice.
The section has worked to influence change in other ways, including by educating lawyers on civil rights issues that matter to their communities.
It leads these conversations through a constant offering of programs and webinars and by developing and sharing other resources, including its long-published magazine,
Human Rights.
“So much of this is education, and of ourselves to begin with,” Agrast says. “We need to learn enough to be able to understand why it’s important for the world’s leading lawyers’ organization to care about and to address these issues.”
The section also has directly involved its members in initiatives that aim to improve the legal profession and society, both at home and abroad.
Among its early international projects was the section’s work with lawyers from the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. White not only studied and spoke Russian but lived in the Soviet Union as a student, and he used those experiences to help the ABA launch an internship program for Soviet lawyers.
In support of political and economic reforms under Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev, the program brought Soviet lawyers to work in law firms, corporations and nonprofit organizations in the United States so they could learn about the Western legal system, White says.
Some ABA members opposed these efforts because of the Soviet Union’s history of restricting human rights, he also recalls.
“But the people who were involved in the program saw this as an opportunity to bring the Soviet Union into the modern human rights culture,” says White, who is now based in London and serves as general counsel of Belfika Mining and Metals Ireland. “And throughout that time, we were well received.”
Also during the 1980s, the section helped initiate an international trial observers project, which offered members the opportunity to monitor trials with human rights implications in countries such as Yugoslavia and Liberia.
Agrast highlights the continued influence of the section’s international work, which extended to the creation of the ABA Center for Human Rights in 2001. He says the section was an early supporter of the presidential rule of law letters, which the ABA president writes to foreign governments to express concerns about potential harassment or abuse of judges, lawyers and other advocates.
In 2007, ABA President William Neukom wrote one of these letters to Pakistan President Gen. Pervez Musharraf in response to his suspension of the country’s constitution, disbanding of the supreme court and arrests of thousands of protesting lawyers.
Agrast says the section’s members were among those leading the charge on the issue in Washington, D.C.
“We were very involved when the lawyers of Pakistan came to the defense of their judges, and our judges and our lawyers stepped up, too,” Agrast says. The ABA “even had a march around the Supreme Court in support of Pakistani lawyers.”
“There were many other centers of interest and activity, but much of it came from the energy and drive of the section,” adds Agrast, who is now vice president of the World Justice Project, which was founded by Neukom as a presidential initiative of the ABA.
Over the years, the section has helped draw more attention to civil rights leaders and the causes they champion.
Wilson Adam Schooley says one of his first contributions as a young member was helping create the Thurgood Marshall Award to recognize individuals who have ardently protected civil rights in this country. Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice, was its inaugural recipient in 1992. Others have included civil rights lawyers Dale Minami and Fred Gray, U.S. Rep. John Lewis and John Echohawk, the executive director of the Native American Rights Fund.
“We gave it to a lot of people who helped raise the profile of the ABA in the civil rights world and made folks think, ‘Oh, so, it’s not just a bunch of old white men who are totally out of touch, and they are actually making progress on these issues,’” says Schooley, a lawyer from California who was chair of the section in 2018-19.
By this time, the section had changed its name to the Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice. Schooley focused on racial justice and encouraged members to tackle the ongoing inequities that existed across the country. As part of this effort, the section traveled to three Alabama cities that were pillars of the 1960s civil rights movement: Birmingham, Montgomery and Selma.
During the trip, members visited the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where a bombing by the Ku Klux Klan killed four young girls in 1963. They also traveled to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s church in Montgomery and the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.
It was an impactful experience, says Schooley, who remembers several members becoming emotional when seeing the historic sites for the first time.
“It opened a lot of people’s eyes,” Schooley says. “And that was the whole point, to really immerse people in that triangle of cities, which was at the heart of not only slavery and 400 years of oppression but of the civil rights movement.”
The section pivoted in recent years, launching several initiatives in response to actions taken by President Donald Trump’s administration.
“I could not have expected the even more urgent need for lawyers and law students and even laypeople to lean into issues surrounding human rights, civil rights and social justice and human dignity,” says Lacy Durham, the immediate past chair of the section. “Because of the change in administration, everything from A to Z was under attack.”
Last year, Durham helped create the first Civil Rights Lawyer Boot Camp, a two-day virtual summit for all lawyers and law students interested in advocating for justice and equality. She says it became critical in the current climate to not only prepare the next generation of civil rights attorneys but equip more lawyers with a strong civil rights foundation.
“Even if you are trained in another area of law, there’s still something you can do,” says Durham, an assistant general counsel at Constellation in Dallas. “You can still use your legal expertise to make an impact locally and nationally.”
Last year, the section also collaborated with several ABA groups to establish a rapid-response project to explain the government’s actions, their impact on civil rights and the steps attorneys can take to protect their communities. For “How Things Work: The Legal Edition,” the section produced dozens of videos aimed to curb the vast amount of disinformation being presented to the public, Durham says.
“As lawyers, we felt the need, and rightfully so, to educate the public on what these things meant and what they did not mean,” she says.
Both initiatives are continuing this year, as is the Chair Chat podcast started by Juan Thomas when he was chair of the section in 2022-23. Like the rapid-response project, he says its purpose is to raise awareness of existing and emerging civil rights issues.
“We assume people know and have information, and often they don’t,” says Thomas, who is of counsel at Clifford Law Offices in Chicago. “I think all of us have a responsibility to figure out ways to help inform the public, inform our members and hopefully call them to action to do something.”
The section has focused on protecting the right to vote through several partnerships and programs, including its Perfecting Democracy initiative, which recruits lawyers to help ensure fair elections. This year, it put together a toolkit that lawyers can use to address voting issues that arise in their jurisdictions before and during this fall’s midterm elections.
“It’s really important to make sure that no matter what your party affiliation is or who you are going to vote for that you can still exercise your constitutional right to vote,” says Sullivan, a partner at Johnson and Sullivan in Chicago. “We are giving lawyers the tools to help with that.”
In August, when Paul Smith takes over as chair of the section, he expects to be just as busy as other leaders have been for the past 60 years.
“The 60th anniversary has come at a time when basic civil rights and civil liberties are being challenged in ways that are shocking and extreme,” says Smith, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. “This is the time when the section needs to step up and push the broader legal profession to stand for the rule of law and minority rights.”
Because of the upcoming elections, Smith, who was previously a senior vice president at the Campaign Legal Center, predicts the next bar year could “be the one when this fight for civil rights and social justice and democracy culminates in a decisive moment for the country.”
“If so, we want to be a part of the conversation pushing the country to live up to its highest ideals,” he says.
