A Guest Blog Post by My Dad, Frank Heffron, Where He Tells Me A Story about a Photograph

I’ll begin with the name of the organization where photo was taken:  NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. 

It is  also known as the Legal Defense Fund, LDF, and the Inc. Fund.

It does the legal work originally done by lawyers of the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

For several years, Thurgood Marshall was lead counsel for the NAACP, which was funded by contributions that were not tax deductible.  In order to raise funds more easily,  LDF was formed in 1939 as a separate corporation that could raise tax deductible contributions.  Marshall became its lead counsel, in charge of a group of talented civil rights lawyers operating separately from the NAACP.

In 1961, Marshall was appointed by JFK to be a judge of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. (He was later appointed to the Supreme Court.)

There were two outstanding candidates to succeed Marshall as Director Counsel of the Fund.  Constance Baker Motley was a black woman with an outstanding record of success. (She eventually was appointed to be a federal judge.) Jack Greenberg, a Jewish man, had a similar record of success, and it was he who Marshall recommended to be his successor.  The Board of Directors appointed him. Motley was not pleased.

{I’m pretty sure my dad told me that, in this photo, Motley is sitting in Marshall’s chair.}

The photo in question was taken in 1962 or 1963 in Greenberg’s office, apparently on a day when he was away.  The subjects are:

Derrick Bell    Frank Heffron    Norman Amaker    Leroy Clark     Constance Baker Motley     Michael Meltsner     George Bundy Smith     James M. Nabrit III 

Being a part of that group was an amazingly wonderful experience in race relations for me. I don’t remember why the picture was taken.  

Derrick Bell later taught at Yale, I think, and at Harvard, where he advocated some things not approved by the administration.  I don’t remember whether that was during Margery’s tenure at Harvard.  You could look it up.  We all got along well; my closest associations were with Mike Meltsner (more later on him) and Jim Nabrit, who was number three in the office after Greenberg and Motley.  He was a brilliant lawyer, a great teacher, and a good friend.  He and his wife Jackie socialized with Mom and me, and we got Christmas cards from Jackie for several years after we moved away. Mike Meltsner and his wife Heli lived two or three three streets away from us on the upper West Side.  He taught at Northeastern Law and Harvard.  At one point he trained for and became a family counselor.  He also wrote a play.  George Smith and I shared a table in the Fund’s library for about a year because there weren’t enough offices at the time. That was where I met, very briefly, Martin Luther King.  George became a Justice of New York State’s highest court, the Court of Appeals. 

Oh, yeah. After leaving the Fund, Jack Greenberg taught at Columbia and became Dean of Students at Columbia College.

More Memory Lane stuff.  As you may remember, as we pulled in the driveway for one of our stays at the little house on the Vineyard, the Morses told us there were some people living in the main house that we knew.  It was Mike and Heli Meltsner.   

One day, while at the Fund, George Smith and I needed to show up at a federal court in lower Manhattan to get admitted to the federal bar.  After that was done, George told me that his roommate Jim Freedman was a clerk for Judge Thurgood Marshall in a nearby office and suggested that we pay a visit.  We did that, and Jim took us in to see the judge.  We were treated to some lively conversation.  When Jim finished lawyering, he became President of Dartmouth.

Not bad.  I had been in a room with three men who were to become a Supreme Court Justice, a Judge on New York’s highest court, and the President of an Ivy College.