{"id":83202,"date":"2006-09-01T10:22:58","date_gmt":"2006-09-01T14:22:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=83202"},"modified":"2018-11-09T13:13:00","modified_gmt":"2018-11-09T18:13:00","slug":"lawyer-james-nabrit-52-helped-to-blaze-the-civil-rights-trail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2006\/09\/01\/lawyer-james-nabrit-52-helped-to-blaze-the-civil-rights-trail\/","title":{"rendered":"Lawyer James Nabrit &#8217;52 helped to blaze the civil rights trail"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"color: #000000;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2014\/12\/alumni-nabrit52.jpg\"><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2014\/12\/alumni-nabrit52.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-83203\" src=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2014\/12\/alumni-nabrit52.jpg\" alt=\"alumni-nabrit52\" width=\"135\" height=\"185\" \/><\/a>In the racist &#8217;60s, the city of Birmingham, Ala., was using the law\u00a0to stifle black activism.<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">A local preacher, Fred Shuttlesworth, had been sentenced to 180 days of hard labor for refusing to move from where he stood in front of a department store. Enter the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and lawyer James M. Nabrit III &#8217;52, who argued and won\u00a0<i>Shuttlesworth v. Birmingham<\/i>\u00a0before the Supreme Court. In its ruling, the court blasted the city, saying its interpretation of the ordinance &#8220;bears the hallmark of a police state.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">The case was one of 12\u00a0Nabrit argued before the Supreme Court (he won nine, for a nifty\u00a0.750 win percentage)\u00a0in an era when the judiciary, not Congress, was the go-to branch for the Civil Right Movement.<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">&#8220;The Congress clearly was not the\u00a0branch for black people because black people were largely excluded from voting,&#8221; Nabrit says. &#8220;The Congress was dominated by the Democratic Party and the most senior members were from the South that practiced racial segregation and discrimination.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">In 1965, Nabrit, who had earned his law degree at Yale, helped blaze a more literal route for the movement. After &#8220;Bloody Sunday,&#8221; in which voting-rights marchers on the outskirts of Selma, Ala., were beaten by state police, a federal court ordered protection for the marchers but demanded a detailed march plan. Nabrit and fellow Legal Defense Fund lawyers, working with Martin Luther King Jr., drew up the now-historic march route from Selma to Montgomery.<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">Among Nabrit&#8217;s favorite cases is a 1968 appellate victory. Cops seeking a murder suspect in Baltimore had conducted 300 raids, mostly in the black community. One man went to bed after watching some New Year&#8217;s Day football games. &#8220;He woke up at 2 a.m. with a shotgun in his face,&#8221; Nabrit says.<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">Nabrit represented the man in his complaint against the city, and an appellate court ruled that the raids were &#8220;the most flagrant invasions of privacy ever to come under the scrutiny of a federal court.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the racist &#8217;60s, the city of Birmingham, Ala., was using the&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"bates_author_byline_override":"","_estimated-read-time":"","_post-template":"","_header-color":"#000000","_photo-credit":"","_header-effect":"parallax","override_related_with_tag":"","_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-batesnews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83202"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":120284,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83202\/revisions\/120284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}