Civil rights lawyer dead at 78

Civil rights lawyer Charles Morgan died Thursday at age 78. The following remembrance of Mr. Morgan comes from the Tuscaloosa News:

Charles Morgan was great lawyer, even greater man

There was a saying in the white community of supporters of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, when the likes of Alabama Gov. George Wallace and Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett defiantly ruled their states and thugs like Bull Conner in Birmingham and Jim Clark in Selma terrorized the majority population:

It was a time when “it took guts to have guts.”

Charles Morgan Jr., who died Thursday at the age of 78, was such a man of formidable intestinal fortitude.

A Birmingham attorney in the early sixties, Morgan defended and represented victims of the Jim Crow segregationist polices of the era, first in Alabama, and later in Georgia, where he opened the first American Civil Liberties Union southern regional office in 1964.

One of his many landmark litigations was Reynolds vs. Sims, an Alabama case dealing with the apportionment of the state legislature that he won in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1964.

Ever heard of the “one-man, one-vote” principle? Well, it was established in part by the precedents set in that case, which dealt a decisive blow to the rural lawmakers who wielded power out of proportion to the number of people they represented.

“It ended gerrymandering,” Richard Cohen, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery told the Associated Press last week after Morgan passed away in Destin, Fla., the victim of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. “It became a bedrock principle for voting rights. It changed the complexion of the South and the country.

“Chuck was a true giant of the legal profession,” Cohen added. “He was a creative genius and was relentless in his pursuit of our Constitution. He was also an incredibly brave and eloquent man.”

Morgan also successfully represented such high profile defendants as Muhammad Ali in his fight against draft evasion charges and Julian Bond, currently the chairman of the NAACP’s national board, when the Georgia Legislature refused to seat him because of a statement he made opposing the Vietnam War.

A graduate of the University of Alabama School of Law, Morgan did not spend much time in Tuscaloosa over the course of the rest of his life, but most people who have eaten at Chuck’s Fish restaurant on Greensboro Avenue downtown know that it is named in his honor by his son, Charles Morgan III, who also owns restaurants in the Destin area.

“My father believed in law and order, but he believed in using the law to change the order,” the younger Morgan, who has involved himself in community betterment projects in Florida and Tuscaloosa, said after his father died. “He was a hell of a man. I wish he could have held out to see Barack Obama get into office. He would have loved to have seen that.”

Indeed, Charles Morgan Sr. helped make Obama’s election possible.