On April 3, W. Haywood Burns, one of the nation's leading civil rights attorneys and the former dean of the City University of New York (CUNY) Law School, was killed in a car crash in Cape Town, South Africa. Also killed in the crash was Professor Shanara Gilbert of CUNY Law School. Burns and Gilbert were attending the International Association of Democratic Lawyers Congress in Cape Town, where they were welcomed by President Nelson Mandela.
The loss of Burns and Gilbert represents a genuine tragedy for the black liberation movement. Burns was a founder of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, and was best known for representing prison inmates following the 1971 Attica prison uprising. He was a general counsel to Martin Luther King, Jr., and an attorney for activist Angela Davis.
From 1987 to 1994, Burns directed the CUNY Law School, making that institution a leader in public interest law. Gilbert was a founder and co-director of the CUNY Law School's Defender Clinic, a member of the board of directors of the National Conference of Black Lawyers and past chairwoman of the conference's Criminal Justice section.
I was asked to give the commencement address to the CUNY Law School last month, to honor the lives and political legacies of Burns and Gilbert. Only days prior his death, before leaving for South Africa, Burns had agreed to become my attorney. The CUNY Law School graduation ceremony was for me and the hundreds in attendance, a deeply emotional event.
I told the graduate class of young lawyers that America today represents twoconflicting realities, two divided images of what we can become as a society, and as a people. There is one elitist version of America, where there are no fundamental social problems. Where the best government is that which does absolutely nothing. Where everyone who is arrested is presumed to be guilty, and where the legal system always punishes only those who have committed crimes. There is an America of Clarence Thomas, where affirmative action is only "reverse discrimination," where sexism doesn't exist, and where poverty is the fault of those who are poor.
There is an America where, as Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia declared recently. when the people of Colorado voted for a referendum denying lesbians and gay men their Constitutional rights, that such discrimination was "eminently reasonable." This is an America where inequality is an accepted fact of life, where undocumented immigrants are view as threats to national security. Robert Dole's America never experiences instances of political inertia or police corruption as related to the problems of minorities and poor people.
But there is another ideal of what our country could be. That ideal rests with the assumption that all human beings, regardless of divergent languages and cultures, genders and sexual orientation, religious faiths and different incomes, might find genuine opportunity-through their own hard work and with help from others, including government-and that they might achieve a decent and productive life for themselves and their children.
Gilbert and Burns had a passionate commitment to the concept that the law should be used as a catalyst, to empower those whose voices are often unheard. When the law is used as a means to define the greater public interest, when legal services can be extended to indigent people, or where the law fights for women who are the victims of abuse, the concept of justice becomes real.
One of the greatest legacies of Haywood Burns and Shanara Gilbert is that they understood that justice is not an abstraction from the lives and problems of everyday people. The law can become a powerful force for addressing the contradictions of America's political and economic system poverty and homelessness, homophobia, anti-Semitism, sexism and racism. When the widest range of people have access to the highest-quality legal education, the democratic ideal becomes alive. Burns and Gilbert inspire us to rememoer that the purpose of the law is not simply order, but justice.
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