State Solicitor General

Can you tell us a little more about the case [Love v. Pullman Co.]?$$Yes.$$Because I think this was one of the--a major Civil Rights action, wasn't it?$$Yes. Oh, it was a major case. It went all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States. It was thrown out. It went all the way up to the Supreme Court, and then it was sent back down for trial. And these were the Pullman porters who basically lived on tips. They made $35 a month, except when they worked as Porter-in-Charge; then they made $38 a month. A Porter-in-Charge is someone who does all the work of a porter and all of the work of a conductor. But because he is black, he can never be a conductor. After the Civil Rights Act was passed, the first thing Earl Love did, a porter out of Denver, Colorado, was to go to the Colorado Human Rights Commission and file a complaint. And that, after going all the way up to the Supreme Court and back down again, finally was getting ready for trial; a nationwide class action, meaning all Pullman porters in America were part of that class. So there was a firm that had been assigned the case out of Denver, but they hadn't been doing very much with the case; so some of the porters came to Hudson, Leftwich and Davenport, about 80 of them. We represented about 88 of the class members. And basically, we carried that lawsuit. We did all of the depositions; we set up an assembly line for preparing Pullman porters for their depositions; we did dozens of them, prepared dozens of them. We took depositions of conductors. We took a deposition of a white conductor who said he didn't even want to retire. They gave him all of his money. They didn't give any of the Pullman porters any severance, anything. They said they could get another job with this railroad or that railroad. It was blatant. It was the kind of discrimination you don't see any more. Thank goodness. Just blatant, vicious, racist. The Pullman porters said that they had to sleep in the toilet. They couldn't sleep in a bunk. They couldn't sleep where the conductors slept. And they talked about all the indignities. One of the porters, I was preparing him for his deposition, and he was fudging with his answer. We wanted them to be so prepared that they would answer any question without hesitation. And he fudged the question, and I--we use every tactic we can to prepare people for deposition--so I slammed my palm on the floor; I said, "Answer the damn question." And he said, "No, I won't. I won't. I won't tell how we had to sleep under brown blankets. I won't tell how we had to sleep in the toilets. I won't tell--I don't want my family knowing what we had to put up with every day. And that don't means we lose the lawsuit. I won't tell it. I won't tell it. I won't tell it," he said. And everybody in the room just--was thunderstruck. Just--I didn't know what to say next, you know. But you know what? He had gotten it out of him. And when he went for his deposition, he told it. And after a while, they didn't want to take anymore depositions. The lawyers for the Pullman Company, they said, "That's enough. We've had enough."$$That's a wonderful story.$And then the Secretary [of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Patricia Roberts Harris] asked me to represent her at the U.N. Conference on Women in Copenhagen [Denmark]. So I went to Copenhagen for--what, three or four weeks, I think it was, for the conference there. And that was extremely interesting. I guess for the first time in my life, I realized that most of the people of the world are people of color. I guess I had already always known it, but to see the women of Africa and Asia and China and South America; it was just fantastic. We were divided into committees. Now, committee, you think of a committee as three or four people in a small room like this one; not in the U.N. A committee has 3 or 400 people in it. And the rules of the U.N. are ironclad. You cannot be recognized unless you follow certain protocols. So my committee was chaired by a Supreme Court justice from Sudan, and she would sweep into the committee room in her full African regalia, head wraps and robes, looking like a queen. It was fantastic. But I couldn't talk to her because I didn't speak French. And that was the--sitting at the U.N., of course, you had headphones and you hear simultaneous translators, but unless you speak French, you cannot speak to most of the people of color of this world. That was a terrible shock to me. [HM] Dorothy Height was there. She brought a French-speaking person with her to do her interpreting for her. She was a fantastic individual.