637 South Dearborn Street, Third Floor
Chicago, Illinois 60605
Ph: 312-913-0039
Fax: 312-913-0045
contact@nlgchicago.org
www.nlgchicago.org
"...to the end that human rights shall be regarded as more sacred than property interests."
The National Lawyers Guild is dedicated to the need for basic and progressive change in the structure of our political and economic system. Through its members -- lawyers, law students, jailhouse lawyers, and
legal workers united in chapters and committees -- the Guild works locally, nationally and internationally as an effective political and social force in the service of the people.
Our aims:
. to eliminate racism;
. to safeguard and strengthen the rights of workers, women, farmers and minority groups, upon whom the welfare of the entire nation depends;
. to maintain and protect our civil rights and liberties in the face of persistent attacks upon them;
. to use the law as an instrument for the protection of the people, rather than for their repression.
More about the NLG
Support Lynne Stewart
"You can't tell lawyers how to do their job."
View Our Rosa Parks Memorial
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1899-1975
A National Lawyers Guild Luminary
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It's exhausting, picking a fight on TV with a racist,
red-baiting U.S. Senator! Clifford Durr catches his breath after his
infamous, televised showdown with Sen. James Eastland before the Internal
Security Subcommittee.
Alabama-born Clifford Durr
"was a grim harbinger to white Southern liberals on the race issue. He
retained many influential contacts from his glowing past a second-echelon
braintruster of the New Deal. The Johnson, Lyndon and Lady Bird, were old
friends, for example, and Durr was related by marriage to Supreme Court
Justice Hugo Black. But these surviving ties counter for very little when
Durr rebelled against the most sensitive taboos of the Cold War era. First
he had resigned his post as FCC Commissioner to represent some of the early
victims of the Truman loyalty program. To Durr, the loyalty hearings were
un-American inquisitions in which innocent people were branded as perverts
or subversives on the word of anonymous FBI informants. His cases isolated
him from mainstream politics, and things grew worse when he returned home
[to Montgomery] to practice law."
— Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters:
American in the King Years, 1954-1963
* 1899 - born to a patrician Montgomery family.
* By his own admission, grew up believing in the racism and class bias
of his family and peers.
* B.A., University of Alabama
* Rhodes Scholar
* 1926 - Married Virginia Foster, later a leading anti-racist activist
& organizer.
* 1933 - FDR hired him as a lawyer for the Reconstruction Finance
Corporation, a New Deal program to reopen Depression-closed banks.
* Depression era - As an obscure, young, government-agency lawyer,
Durr observed that, even in a time of economic collapse, "fat cats" were
able to protect their wealth as the masses went unfed.
* 1941 - Quit the RFC in protest over sweetheart deals to military
contractors. FDR appointed Durr to the FCC (which, as Taylor Branch writes,
he also quit).
* 1942 - FBI puts Durr under surveillance.
* 1948-1954 - In a disastrously unprofitable private practice in
Washington, Durr represented government employees accused of being security
risks. Durr famously and vocally refused to care whether his clients
actually were members of the Communist Party or had been falsely accused of
membership.
* 1949 - Joined the National Lawyers Guild.
* Sponsored the Highlander Folk School with Aubrey Williams. Early in
its history, Highlander was one of the few places in the South where Black
and white people could work and study together.
* March, 1954 - Famously lost his temper during a red-baiting hearing
convened by the segregationist Sen. James Eastland, challenging the
notorious white supremacist to a fistfight and being restrained by guards.
* December 1955 - With wife Virginia Foster Durr, bailed out Rosa
Parks, who went
to jail after refusing to yield her bus seat to a white man. With lead
counsel Fred Gray, Clifford Durr represented Rosa Parks in court.
* Durr continued to struggle for civil liberties after his 1964
retirement, through travel, lectures, and writing.
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