By Bob Zellner
Today’s headlines mirror the tension
contained in every line of The Butler’s Child. Lewis M. Steel describes a
life well lived, with one eye on a privileged upbringing as a Warner Brothers
heir, and the other on his chosen career as a revolutionary civil rights
lawyer. Like the iconic justice scales of his profession teetering between
punishment and mercy, Steel’s description of the Hamptons, Hollywood and high
living on Central Park West contrasts sharply with the terror he faced trying
to sleep on a motel floor in Baton Rouge in 1967. On the floor he reasoned a
white New York NAACP lawyer could avoid bullets that might be fired through his
motel window by nightriders.
The timeliness of The Butler’s Child has
just been demonstrated by the death of a black man in Baton Rouge at the hands
of two ill trained young white police officers. Fifty years ago Steel thought
of the Deep South as a dangerous and racist place. Today, however, it has
become clear that racism and trigger-happy cops are national phenomena. Alton
Sterling’s murder in Louisiana, at the southern end of the Mississippi River,
quickly followed by Philando Castile’s murder at the other end, prompted even
Minnesota’s governor to admit that Castile would not have been shot
during a traffic stop if he were white.
Lewis Steel’s celebrity sprinkled early
life also clashed, he felt, with his sense of impending doom and mass death
bearing down, like Greek Tragedy, on inmates during the Attica uprising, where
he was on the negotiating team trying to achieve a peaceful end to
the prison takeover. Therein lies the rub. Steel likes the white
privilege coming from money and power while at the same time suffering pangs of
conscience that black people, and poor people in general, are not treated equally. Lawyers,
officials and celebrities on the negotiating team at Attica, for example, were
whisked to safety from the prison yard shortly before police massacred both
inmates and their hostages. “I could step out of the struggle into the
comfort of a bourgeois life,” he writes, “as I did almost every night.” He
was also grateful that he did not have to worry about bills, that “…having
Bessie Warner as a grandmother smoothed the way.” While opposing the
status quo, he ruefully admits, he found himself, “…unwilling to burn the house
down to try to create a new world.”
It is remarkable that
the author worked for fifty years not only as a civil rights lawyer but as a
radical one. Crusading legal guns - most of them, like Lewis Steel, were
members of The National Lawyers Guild - took their cue from Walden Pond’s Henry
Thoreau who famously said, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of
evil to one who is striking at the root.” Our current crop of young human
rights lawyers will appreciate Steel’s hair-raising stories of working
alongside legendary courtroom stars like Bill Kunstler, Arthur Kinoy, and two
who died recently, Don Jelinek and Michael Ratner. Reviewers have examined
the difficulty Michael Steel had breaking out of the wealth and power
bubble. Maybe he was hard wired to be sympathetic to people of color and
all powerless folk. That he even tried to break out of his bubble of
privilege was due primarily to Steel’s relationship with his childhood mentor
and surrogate parent, Bill Rutherford, the butler for Grandma Bessie and Major
Warner. Interaction with Rutherford, the African American servant, and
Bill’s wife, Lorraina, in some ways mirrors the experience we southern children
had with our black friends and caretakers.
My own situation of breaking with white
privilege might afford some insight into Steel’s struggle - with some
differences. My father grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, a member of the
KKK, as were his father and brothers. When Dad left the Klan to work with
Martin Luther King and SCLC’s Joseph Lowery in Alabama, his father
disowned him and his blood brothers never spoke to him again. So with a
little help from my father, one might say, I journeyed from the KKK to MLK.
With lots of help from the loving
Rutherfords, Lewis managed to prick his bubble of wealth and learn to give
back. His life of service was certainly in part an effort to make amends
for the way his family treated “the servants.” After a certain age, close
relationships change to more closely resemble master and servant than friend,
buddy, mentor, or parent figure. Throughout this compelling nonfiction
narrative of an exciting life, Steel compulsively returns to his troubled
relationship with Bill Rutherford.
Because of his sense of unfinished
business with Bill Rutherford, Lewis was grateful for the relationship he and
his Irish Catholic wife built with the great legal mind, Robert Carter, and
colleagues in the NAACP. Carter will forever be known for his
groundbreaking legal work with Thurgood Marshall and the team that achieved the
Brown Decision ending legal school segregation. After never quite managing
to have equality with his sometimes father figure, Bill Rutherford, Steel was
relieved that he could approximate it with Carter. Bob Carter’s acceptance
reassured Steel that he could have a brotherly bond with a black man. Carter,
sharing a degree of brotherhood, helped Lewis understand that faithfulness was
a requirement given that African Americans know that a white person could
return to the good life leaving people of color to face a lifelong
struggle. I understand the strong bond forged in struggle between Carter,
the southern black man born in Caryville, Florida, and Steel, the Jewish white man
from New York. I, like Bob Carter, born in the Florida panhandle, came to
understand that hate is an acid that corrodes the container in which it is
carried. Jay, Florida, where I was born, has even fewer people than the
218 in Caryville where Steel’s friend Carter was born. We call that part
of Florida, LA or Lower Alabama, where black southerners of a certain age have
found it in their hearts to forgive white folks who join the freedom fight.
Lewis Steel, the legal scholar,
knows that racial oppression and racism have become indelibly stained into all
aspects of American life and law since the original moral compromise of
enslaved blacks being only three fifths of a person became part of our founding
principles and documents. His life narrative revolves around his efforts
to erase that stain and he is still trying. Lewis M. Steel knows that it
should not have been tolerated for a moment, by our founding mothers and
fathers, that children of enslaved mothers would be eternally enslaved, much less
become enshrined in the United States Constitution.
Throughout his story Attorney Steel
lapses in and out of despair, doubting that the law will ever be a useful tool
in undoing racism. The murders of two black men by white police officers
in recent days has now been followed by the brutal massacre of police officers
in Dallas. Oh when will we ever learn…that freedom is a constant
struggle? Race war, seemingly fomented by a resurgent nationalist populism
in this country and around the white western world is not the answer.
Donald Jelinek, who worked with Lewis
Steel representing the Attica inmates, has just died at 87. He picked his own
epitaph, telling his wife he hoped his obituary would simply say, ‘He had people who he loved and who loved him . . . and
he was part of SNCC.’” Lewis Michael Steel has loved and lived an equally
good life and I believe he has learned a lesson that Ms. Ella J. Baker taught
to all NAACP, SNCC and movement folks, that brotherhood and sisterhood is not
so wild a dream as those who profit by postponing it pretend.
Bob Zellner is the author
of The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A
White Southerner in the Freedom Struggle.
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