The Work of Julius Chambers

When Mother remarried, we moved to my new dad’s home state of North Carolina. We went briefly to Durham then on to our forever-home, Charlotte. We arrived September 1970 when, thanks to the work of Julius Chambers, school across America was about to change.

Chambers was a graduate of my alma mater, UNC Law School. Unlike me, he graduated first in his class. He served as the first African American chief of the Law Review. In 1964, Chambers was working toward his LLM in law. At the same time, he served as an intern at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Guess who was his mentor? Thurgood Marshall. Chambers came into my life when he won the Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education school case.

Like so much of school desegregation, the Swann case had begun long before my feet hit North Carolina soil. During the first set of hearings, in 1965, white supremacists bombed Chambers’ home. The local victory came in 1969. Lead counsel Chambers convinced District Court Judge McMillan the city was not doing enough to desegregate the school system. McMillan ruled that the law, having created school segregation, must undo segregation. That included by busing students away from segregated neighborhoods, if necessary.

The city appealed the ruling but September 1970—when we began school in Charlotte—McMillan ordered the buses to roll. In 1971, when Chambers was only thirty-five years old, he won the appeal of McMillan’s decision at the United States Supreme Court. As result, students began riding buses all over the country. That year, hateful racists bombed Chambers’ downtown Charlotte law offices.

From 1970 until I graduated in 1975, the desegregation effort dominated my schooling. This era seems like a dream of the past, when we accepted that segregation didn’t “just happen.” The law intentionally created segregation and thus the law should be required to clean up its own damn mess. Thanks to the work of Julius Chambers, this ethic is embedded in my brain.