Jo Freeman's Review of Gil Venable's Mississippi & After: A Life in Equal Justice Law
Mississippi & After: A Life in Equal Justice Law By Gil Venable
Published by One Monkey Books, San Francisco, CA, 2020; 179 pages
In the summer of 1965 two brothers left their Pittsburgh home to go South to work for civil rights. The older brother went to Mississippi. The younger brother went to South Carolina. The former became a lawyer. The latter became an editor and publisher. The older brother wrote a memoir but didn’t complete it before dying in 2019. The younger brother published it last fall.
Gil Venable’s book is primarily about his summer working for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. LCCRUL was founded in 1963 at the request of President Kennedy (and is sometimes called the President’s Committee). Many big law firms associated with LCCRUL allowed their partners and associates to spend a few weeks representing civil rights cases and black defendants in Mississippi. There were only three black lawyers in the entire state and white lawyers wouldn’t take these cases. They were assisted by law students, for which this was a summer job.
Gil was one of those students, having completed his first year at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. He returned committed to becoming a public interest lawyer. He joined the Pittsburgh ACLU, and after graduation, became its first executive director. About a quarter of the book is about his work with the ACLU. In 1970 Gil moved to Arizona to become Assistant Dean of the ASU law school. He stayed to raise a family while involved with social justice issues. This book tells you about more than his legal work. You learn a lot about his ancestors and his girlfriends.
Three days after he arrived in Jackson, some eight hundred blacks were arrested as they walked toward the state capitol demanding the right to vote. They were imprisoned in cattle stockades at the fairgrounds. Gil wrote that "these arrests put me to work with some of the best legal minds of America."
The typical law student spends his summer in the library doing research for attorneys. Gil did a lot of this, but he also interviewed those jailed, those accused, and those contemplating action. Nor was he confined to Jackson. He drove all over the state, including Natchez, which he called the Klan Capitol of the state, the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman Farm, and the Delta, where blacks outnumber whites.
He "began to see that law on paper is one thing. In reality, it lives in the hearts and minds of the people." He heard judges interpret the law not as written but as their friends and neighbors would want it enforced. He also read decisions from federal Circuit judges which overturned those interpretations. In the middle of the summer he heard Dr. King speak on a trip to Jackson.
Gil’s summer in Mississippi was certainly more interesting than his brother’s in South Carolina, and that one was pretty good.
After graduating and clerking for a year Gil was offered his "ideal" job with the Greater Pittsburgh ACLU, with one caveat. He had to raise his own salary. He took the offer and got to represent construction workers, feminists, and welfare mothers, among others. One of his biggest successes was exposing the kickbacks involved in setting high bail bonds – which was good for the bondsmen and the judges but not for impoverished defendants.
In Arizona he worked on many different issues. Among them was getting public education for disabled children and asylum appeals for border crossers. He met some interesting people, some of whom readers will recognize.
Overall, Gil Venable had a life worth living, and worth reading about.
© 2021 Jo Freeman for SeniorWomen.com
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