Vernon Jordan on Primus King, true courage, and the long road we’ve traveled

One of the greatest men I have ever known is Vernon Jordan, my former partner in Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, LLP.  Newsweek recently ran an excerpt from Jordan’s new book, Make it Plain.  The excerpt makes as clear as is possible that legal progress requires imagination and, perhaps most of all, sheer courage: 

Primus King was my man.

Born in 1900 in Hatchechubbee, Alabama, the son of sharecroppers, Primus E. King grew up in Columbus, Georgia, where his parents had moved to escape the grinding oppression of the sharecropping system. King was unlettered—like many Southern blacks in those decades for whom the state and local governments made formal schooling an impossibility.

But Primus King well understood the denial of rights blacks endured. His determination to be as independent as possible of the South’s Jim Crow–rigged system of government and social relations showed itself early in his learning the trade of barbering. Later, in 1939, King’s religious faith led him to become an itinerant Sunday preacher, ministering as called by one of the many small black churches that dotted the Black Belt countryside in Georgia and Alabama. It was that faith, he later said, which fortified him for the task he undertook on July 4, 1944.

On that day, Reverend Primus King walked into the Muscogee County Courthouse in Columbus, Georgia, to cast his vote in the state’s Democratic Party primary election. Because the racist Democratic Party monopolized political activity in Georgia as it did throughout the South, the primary determined the outcome of the general election. For that very reason, the state Democratic Party barred blacks from voting in the primary. It was that travesty of democracy that King, quietly supported by the local NAACP, intended to change.

“I am a citizen of this city and this state,” he declared to the white election officials that day. “I own property. I pay taxes. I can read and write and do arithmetic, and I have not committed a crime of moral turpitude. I have come to vote.”

His words got King roughly escorted out of the courthouse by police officers. But King persisted, and with the prearranged help of two local white lawyers, filed a federal suit to outlaw blacks’ exclusion from the Democratic primary.

That brought a warning from party officials, who summoned King before them and bluntly told him that “if you don’t withdraw the lawsuit, you could end up in the Chattahoochie River.”

King, standing alone before the pillars of segregationist power, replied, “Well, if that happens, then at least I’ll be thrown in the river for something, as opposed to all the colored people who’ve been thrown in there for nothing.” And he walked out.

In October 1945, the Federal District Court in Macon, Georgia, ruled in King’s favor, striking down the Georgia white primary. In March 1946, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans upheld that ruling, and the following month the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the Georgia Democratic Party’s appeal.

The all-white Georgia Democratic primary now officially stood where it belonged—outside the bounds of the Constitution of the United States.