Profile: 'The most remarkable lawyer or judge that I've ever met'

When George N. Leighton moved to Chicago in October 1946, he couldn't eat in restaurants. He couldn't stay in hotels. He couldn't catch a cab in The Loop.

Leighton, a decorated World War II hero and a Harvard Law School graduate, couldn't even rent an office downtown or join the Chicago Bar Association.

Just because he's black.

"Naturally, black lawyers didn't have the opportunity that white lawyers had, no matter what law school they went to," Leighton said. "I went to one of the best law schools in America, but that didn't make any difference.

"Despite what I've said, I lived through it."
 

Leighton, now 97, has spent nearly 40 years in private practice, representing clients, often without pay, in criminal and civil rights cases. In his career, he defended more than 200 criminal charges in bench and jury trials and handled more than 175 appeals or reviews, civil and criminal, in state and federal courts.

In 1951, he founded Moore, Ming and Leighton, which became one of the largest predominantly black law firms in the country. He became active in the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois and served as general counsel and president of the Chicago Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, fighting for blacks in Illinois and the South in cases involving voting rights, integrated schools, open housing and equal access to jury service.

In one case, Leighton traveled to Georgia to represent the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. In another case, Thurgood Marshall, the first black person to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, traveled from New York to defend Leighton against criminal charges in Chicago.

Leighton served five years as a Cook County circuit judge, seven years as an Illinois Appellate Court justice and 11 years as a U.S. district court judge in the Northern District of Illinois.

He joined The John Marshall Law School as an adjunct professor in 1965. He taught classes in criminal law and procedure, as well as in prisoners' rights, until 2004. Early in his teaching career, he helped persuade the American Bar Association to continue accrediting evening law school programs.

Leighton joined Neal & Leroy as of counsel in 1987 and continues to try criminal and civil rights cases.

Jerold S. Solovy, chairman emeritus of Jenner & Block, first met Leighton during lunch at the Chicago Bar Association. Solovy, who was then a young lawyer, asked his colleagues "who the distinguished gentleman was, because he was always well-dressed." The two became great friends, and in June 2008, Solovy and his wife established a scholarship in Leighton's name at Harvard Law School.

Solovy said he feels like Leighton's biographer - he knows all his stories and, in past years, presented him with several awards, including the Illinois Supreme Court Historic Preservation Commission's first Honorable George N. Leighton Justice Award.

"He suffered all of these things, and yet, he is a man with no rancor," Solovy said. "He will tell you how Chicago warmly welcomed him and made a great career for him, which isn't true. But that's his attitude."

Leighton was born in October 1912 in New Bedford, Mass. - an area he affectionately calls "Moby Dick country." His parents immigrated from the African-coastal Cape Verde Islands; from March to November, they worked alongside Leighton and his brothers and sisters in cranberry bogs.

He spoke Crioulo, a Portuguese dialect, at home, and he attended school for only a few months each year, but Leighton said he never lost the hope of becoming educated. In 1929, while in the seventh grade, he took a job as a ship cook's assistant on an oil tanker that sailed from Cape Cod to Aruba. After three years, he returned to New Bedford and enrolled in correspondence and night school classes.

Leighton moved to Boston and worked in restaurant kitchens until 1935, when he entered an essay contest that promised two $200 scholarships to children of Cape Verdean descent who attended public school in New Bedford. Leighton won the contest, but since he had not graduated from high school, the scholarship foundation told him that he would receive the first $100 if a college accepted him and the second $100 if he passed his first semester.

He applied to Howard University in Washington, D.C., and, even though the school rejected his application, they allowed him to enter as an unclassified student in 1936. When he made the dean's honor roll in the first year, he received the rest of his scholarship. The school also agreed to make him a candidate for a degree in the College of Liberal Arts.

In 1940, he graduated magna cum laude from Howard with a degree in history and a scholarship to Harvard Law School.

In March 1942, after the onset of World War II, Leighton left Harvard Law and reported to active duty as an ROTC second lieutenant. He served for three years and with the rank of captain, returned to Harvard in October 1945. He finished his final two years in just 12 months and graduated with a law degree in October 1946.

"I knew that staying in Massachusetts wasn't worthwhile," he said. "Massachusetts is a state where stature, family, wealth and substance meant a lot. I had none of that. No one bothered to interview me."

Leighton also decided against New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. He chose Chicago, he said, when he discovered that it was the only city in America with a substantial black population that put a black person - William L. Dawson - in Congress.

"It sounds like peculiar reasoning, but for me, it meant something," Leighton said. "You couldn't elect a black person unless black people vote for him. I've never regretted the decision to come here."

Leighton found his first job with Christopher C. Wimbish, a black state senator who ran his own law practice. He said Wimbish asked him to go to court in his place, but told him he couldn't afford to give him a salary or his own desk. Leighton said he made enough money in this "ad-hoc arrangement" to move his wife and two daughters from his in-laws' home in Washington, D.C., to a two-story house on South St. Louis Avenue in June 1947.

"That's how I started practicing law in Chicago," Leighton said. "I was always representing someone with no money, which is always a hard way to earn a living. But I was fortunate, and things went my way."

Leighton defended clients charged with violent offenses, such as assaults, rapes and murders, and worked with the NAACP and ACLU to represent clients in cases involving racial segregation and civil rights abuses.

Leighton said he considers the Harvey Clark case one of his most famous. In 1951, Clark, a black man and a veteran of World War II, rented an apartment in an all-white apartment building in Cicero. When the police refused to let Clark and his family in the building, he went to Leighton, who was then the chair of the Legal Redress Committee of the Chicago Branch of the NAACP.

Leighton filed a lawsuit in federal court and obtained a mandatory injunction directing the town of Cicero and its police department to allow the Clark family to enter the building. When they returned to Cicero, Leighton said, the white crowd set the building on fire, forcing Gov. Adlai Stevenson to call in the Illinois National Guard.

"Think of the spectacle - adult white people burning a building because the owner rented an apartment in the building to a black family," Leighton said.

When the Cook County state's attorney filed an indictment against Leighton for conspiracy to incite a riot, Marshall acted as Leighton's lead defense counsel. The court dismissed the indictment, and Leighton filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Clarks for civil rights violations. They settled the lawsuit for nearly $8,000, Leighton said, but the family never moved into the building.

In addition to his work in Illinois, Leighton handled civil rights cases in the South.

Early in his career, the ACLU asked him to represent 10 blacks in Mobile, Ala., in a challenge to an amendment to the state constitution that required residents to pass a test before they could vote. Leighton filed a lawsuit in federal court, alleging that election officials instituted the Boswell Amendment (named for the state senator who proposed it) to keep blacks from voting. The court agreed and found the amendment unconstitutional.

In 1954, Leighton traveled to Carroll County, Miss., to defend Robert Lee Goldsby, a black man indicted for murdering a white woman. As he prepared to argue that the court should dismiss the indictment since blacks were barred from serving on the jury, Goldsby's family hired a white lawyer and asked him to withdraw from the case.

In 1956, Goldsby's family again asked for Leighton's help, after the court sentenced Goldsby to death and the Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed the ruling. Three years later, after filing several petitions based on his argument that blacks were systematically excluded from jury service, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that Goldsby should be retried before a multiracial jury.

In 1960, Marshall asked Leighton to represent Martin Luther King Jr. after he was arrested for a traffic violation in Atlanta. Leighton flew to Georgia, but by the time he arrived, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy had already intervened to release King from jail.

One afternoon in 1964, Leighton received a call from Mayor Richard J. Daley. The mayor wanted to know if he would run for judge of the Cook County Circuit Court.

"I said facetiously that anyone who knew Chicago in 1964 would know that for a lawyer to get a phone call from Mayor Richard J. Daley asking that lawyer if he would be willing to be a candidate was like that lawyer being elected in a landslide," Leighton said. "I was, in fact, elected by a landslide."

Leighton said he was one of 18 candidates on the ticket of the Democratic Party; he was the only black person on the ticket.

Leighton served in the criminal court for three years, and in 1967, he moved to the chancery division. In 1969, the Illinois Supreme Court appointed him to fill a vacancy on the 1st District Appellate Court of Illinois. In the next general election, he was elected to a 10-year term and served there until 1976, when President Gerald Ford appointed him to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. He retired in 1987.

"I was a judge for 23 years in the state courts and in the federal courts," Leighton said. "It turned out well. I would do it again if I had to. It's always rewarding to do something effective, something worthwhile."

Dan K. Webb, chairman of Winston & Strawn, first met Leighton when he was a "young pup of a lawyer" just out of law school. Webb, then an assistant U.S. attorney who appeared in Leighton's federal courtroom, said the judge impressed him.

"He was always on top of the law and the facts," he said. "More importantly, he was fair to all sides. He liked lawyers, he was respectful of lawyers, and he enjoyed hearing arguments from lawyers."

A few years ago, Leighton and Webb co-represented a labor union. Webb said he was "truly amazed that someone over 90 could have enormous intellectual capacities and be the person that was leading the strategy development."

Judge Ann Claire Williams, the first black judge to serve in the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, also met Leighton when she was an assistant U.S. attorney. Like Webb, she said Leighton impressed her with his fairness and intelligence.

In 1985, she asked Leighton to swear her in to the U.S. District Court. She served alongside him and said he always made time to mentor the younger judges.

"I think in part because of the way he grew up and the struggles he went through, he is able to relate to every man and every woman," Williams said. "His relationship with the people who are the cleaning people of the world is just as fine as his relationship to judges or other dignitaries."

"He is so grateful for the people who gave him hands along the way, and he's never forgotten that," she said. "He extends his hands to people who come after him."

No one in Massachusetts ever told Leighton that the color of his skin made any difference. He found out in Washington, D.C. when he went to a baseball game and walked across the street to a sandwich shop.

"I walked up there like an innocent boob and said, 'I'll have a piece of apple pie,'" he said. "This fellow came and looked at me and said, 'We don't serve niggers in this place. Get out.'

"That's what he told me, in the nation's capital."

Leighton said Chicago was once the most segregated city in America. It was here, he said, that white lawyers invented the race-restricted covenant, an agreement that kept white homeowners from selling their homes to blacks.

But when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibited restaurants from refusing to serve black patrons and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that opened the ballot box to blacks, Leighton said "it made all of the difference in the world."

"I played a small part in that because I, as president of the Chicago Branch of the NAACP, filed lawsuits against all of these people, including the Morrison Hotel," he said.

The best way around racism, Leighton said, is to "philosophically ignore much of it." He said he slowly began getting more white clients and that at times he had more white clients than black ones.

Ronald S. Miller, senior partner at Miller, Shakman & Beem, teamed up with Leighton after they met in the '60s to create a new scholarship program. They persuaded local law schools to waive tuition for minority students and raised funding to pay for their expenses. Miller said Leighton, who was a sitting federal judge at the time, helped send a half-dozen black and Hispanic students to law school each year.

"He's the most remarkable lawyer or judge that I've ever met," Miller said. "He has great dignity and an acute sense of the law's ability to protect people who would otherwise be defenseless."

Langdon D. Neal, a principal and owner of Neal & Leroy, now works with Leighton at his law firm.

He said Leighton represents a different era in the legal profession, a time when such qualities like courtesy, respect for the law and the opponent, and high moral standards prevailed.

Neal said Leighton represented blacks when there were very few blacks in the profession. He practiced during segregation, discrimination and exclusion, Neal said, and overcame those hurdles to become a "trailblazer."

"He's such an inspiration and a role model for the young attorneys," Neal said. "He sets the tone in everything he does that demands excellence. No work product leaves his desk that isn't perfect. It's that commitment to his work that we all strive for.

"We have a living role model for that. They're not just words. There is actually a person who embodies that every day of their life."

When asked what's most important to him, Leighton said staying healthy and spending time with his family. He has five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, with another on the way.

He said a lot of people think he's a workaholic, but he rebuts that claim.

"If you take away everything that keeps you occupied, you'd go to pieces," Leighton said. "Being law-educated is a wonderful thing. There are lots of things you can do as a lawyer, and there are various aspects of the law. A lot of them are remunerative, all of them are opportunities to serve."