Civil Rights, Law, and the Federal Courts: The Life of Cecil Poole, 1914-1997


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VII Community Activities and Organizations


[Interview 9: September 9, 1993]

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Lowell High School Innovations

Hicke

I'd like to start today with more on the 1970s; please tell me about the things that you were doing other than practicing law—your professional and community activities.


Poole

In the early sixties I had become quite interested in the structuring of the public schools in this area. First of all, there was the concern about the racial composition of many of the schools. In addition to the problems of racial admixture, there were also the problems of excellence of the schools, or lack of it. Various superintendents of the public education, both in Sacramento and in this area, had some ideas about it. They came from political challenges to schools like Lowell.


Hicke

Lowell High School?


Poole

Yes. Lowell had always been a school that was San Francisco's sort of pride of academic excellence and that sort of thing. A lot of people thought, That's all right to have some of that, but we ought to be democratic about this. I guess the fact is that if you are going to be democratic in the sense that you're not going to let people be turned away because they don't meet the educational standards or excellence, then you have a problem. It's very hard to insist on the one and then not have that one become like all the rest of the schools. So the questions were really whether or not, in a democracy, there was still room for schools like Lowell. A lot of us thought that there were. It wasn't easy to articulate this.

The Board of Education was primarily staunchly in favor of the Lowell concept, even though they were accused of being snobs and


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of making it impossible to share educational benefits with groups of people who, by reason of residence or race, prior education, and so forth, very badly needed it. I had a kind of sneaking feeling that a lot of those kids didn't so much need that as they needed some basic discipline, which you have to have in order to comprehend, to get along, and to profit by the kind of training they had at Lowell. But there was also the idea that it didn't have to be 100 percent or nothing. The problems that we had were really how do you bring in some of these components of kids who may not have the grade structure that was regarded as minimal at Lowell? But how do you bring them in without overwhelming Lowell either?

There was a group of parents who had moved into that area and they wanted of Lowell an area school, or wanted to make it like 60 percent an area school. The educators, whom I believed knew what they were talking about, said that you simply couldn't do it on that basis. So then the question was, how do you know if you've never tried? They then tried it. It wasn't perfect, but it didn't turn out to be what they feared it would be, and Lowell gradually opened up to more kids, but basically it remained the kind of school that it had been. What really happened there was a lot of the kids, who somewhere else might not have risen to these heights of accomplishment, did very, very well, because it works both ways. You do as your peers do.


Hicke

Sure, they were stimulated.


Poole

That's correct, and at the same time, Lowell was doing well—they always did well—athletically. You couldn't say these were frail, anemic kids. There were some pretty big guys there. That was one of the things that I spent some time in. We enlisted the aid of the educational people in the national office of the NAACP, and they were interested in it and gave us a lot of help and support. That helped both sets of people. They could say, "You see, it wasn't so bad when you brought these kids in." And it wasn't. For a while, it was kind of touch and go, and people would say to me, "In the sixties you were the U.S. attorney; what's your interest in it?" I said, "I guess my interest in it is that I'm a father, and I was that before I became the U.S. attorney, [laughter] so I'm interested, not only in my kids, but yours and some of the others too."


Hicke

Was Charlotte involved in this also?


Poole

She wasn't in that aspect of it. These were all meetings of the San Francisco Board of Education. We made suggestions, we made presentations to them, we brought in educators, and we championed them when we thought the board was correct. There were times when


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you had to fight down motions and things that were coming up. People had all kinds of terrible ideas. I remember at one of the meetings of the board, I was sitting there, and I think the person next to me was one of the people who came out from New York. Her name was June Shagaloff, and she was educational advisor to the national office of the NAACP. She came out several times because they were interested in this, because there weren't too many of these kinds of experiments going on in the schools. The position that the NAACP took was that it's very important to have schools of excellence to which children can repair at times. I thought that was a pretty forward step. Of course, they got criticized a lot, saying you're going contrary to the best interests of your race. You got all that, but they kept it up. That was one thing.


Hicke

And a successful ending, I take it, to that project?


Poole

Yes.


Civil Rights Actions in San Francisco Employment Practices

Poole

There were in the sixties also efforts to do something about San Francisco's rigid employment structure. When I first came to San Francisco, you could walk from Haight Street all the way down to the Embarcadero, and the only nonwhite that you would see would be people who were in custodial and janitorial positions. At that time, to the best of my knowledge, there wasn't a single black person in any of the department stores. They simply weren't there. Every now and then you would find they would have somebody; the Emporium would change its displays in the windows, and you would have a couple of window design people, and there might be one black woman, something like that, but she was mainly holding a cloth for them. It was that sort of thing. They simply didn't hire them. To my great surprise when we got to this city, one of the few persons who was rather frequently the subject of comment was one of the characters of San Francisco—I don't mean that as invidious term, but as a person who was kind of a patron and was a standard maker.


Hicke

Who was this?


Poole

His name was Joseph—I don't remember his name. But they referred to him always as Joe Shreve. He was the doorman at Shreve's. They said, If you're going to have a reception at your home and you want somebody to take care of the cars and all that, you had to get Joe Shreve. He would be the doorman. He would wear his


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gloves and be the doorman and make sure that everything went off right. He knew all the protocol and people, and he was frequently in Herb Caen's column.

After the initial period of the sit-ins took place in the South in the early sixties, it sort of spread like wildfire.


Hicke

The civil rights movement?


Poole

Yes. There came demands that the stores and establishments hire some people other than whites. I can remember Gene McAteer, who was the owner of McAteer's Restaurant out at Fisherman's Wharf, sitting down with me and a couple of other people and explaining to me that no one who ever applied to be a waiter at McAteer's Fisherman's Wharf Restaurant was used to this kind of service. They had worked in the restaurants in New Orleans and in the South traditionally. I said to him one time, "That's utter nonsense, Gene, that's utter nonsense." I got to know Gene pretty well. "You're blind." It took a long time for him to see that. Fisherman's Wharf—in those days, if you went out to have dinner or lunch, and if you were a black person, if the maitre d', whoever it was, knew you, he would get you seated quickly and make it clear that you spoke English and that you ate with your knife and fork and not your hands. But if he was not there and they had a substitute, you could tell he was going to take you to the last table in the place. That's the way Fisherman's Wharf was. No first class hotel in San Francisco would accommodate black guests until Ben Swig opened the Fairmont. Ben came from Boston, and he was proud of having been there. In fact, he would wear it out telling you about it. But it was true, the Fairmont was the first of the large hotels that broke that up.

I remember when I was—what was the year, let me see; it would have been 1949—I think it was '48 or '49. There was a traveling theatrical group, and they had a play that was called "Deep are the Roots." They were mainly people who had been in and around the studios and places in Los Angeles and Burbank and Hollywood, primarily as extras. But they formed this company and they were on the road. They made reservations from Los Angeles for a week at a Geary Street hotel. It was one of those small hotels that they had on Geary very near the two big theaters—the Hotel Cecil. When they showed up, the manager of the hotel said this was some great mistake. They said, "No, we have a written confirmation." He said, "Yes, I see that. I'm terribly sorry, but we don't have any rooms. It was a mistake."

At that time, I was practicing law, and so they came to me with their complaint, and I filed the first lawsuit. I filed it and served them and got ready to take them to court, and they


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capitulated. They said they were willing to enter into any kind of a policy statement that we wanted. I was talking about a lot of money. I didn't think we were going to get it. In any event, I do remember that that case settled, and my clients didn't want me to settle it on that basis, but I persuaded them I was correct. They settled it for $500 of attorney's fees and costs and whatever our expenses would have been, and for a declaration of policy in writing that this hotel would not discriminate against any guests on account of color or race. They posted it, and a lot of people said why didn't we get $10,000. I said, "That's worth more than $10,000. That's the purpose of doing this." Gradually, the other restaurants around began to see—So they still did it for a long time, subtly. Ben Swig immediately proclaimed what the policy was at the Fairmont, and with that in mind, the Mark Hopkins trembled. The Mark Hopkins had at one time been owned by Gene Autry.


Hicke

Is that right? I didn't realize that.


Redevelopment in the Western Addition and Japantown

Poole

There were all of these kinds of things that had to be done in San Francisco. When they did the first redevelopment construction in San Francisco, it was necessary for the Board of Supervisors to designate an area [for redevelopment], and the area they designated was the Western Addition. The part of the Western Addition that they designated was an area than ran from about, I guess from Fillmore Street through about six blocks over and from around Geary or Post and going down to about, I guess it would have been Golden Gate. There were five or six of us lawyers who worked on it at the instance of the Council for Civil Unity. The proposed ordinance was drafted in my office, and we came and presented that to this big public meeting, which was held in the Civic Auditorium, as I remember, the night before the Fourth of July. I think it was about 1964. That was a project that, for a lot of reasons, really didn't get going until years later. It's there now. What had happened was, when World War II hit, there were many Japanese in that area.


Hicke

It's very near Japantown.


Poole

That is correct, and Japantown was included—the area around Fillmore Street and Steiner and going from Pine or Bush up the hill. So they moved the Japanese out, and, of course, that meant a whole lot of the structure that made up the Japanese community was just gone. As long as they were there, they paid up their


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obligations. But they put them in concentration camps, and a lot of them lost their property. A lot of the property was taken over, and that is why that area, for a long time, became so heavily black. When World War II went on they needed workers. So in two places they did construction or utilized the properties. One was over in Marin City, where those highrises are. Well, I'll tell you about those things too. They moved the Japanese out, and, for example, a Japanese recreation hall became the Buchanan Street YMCA, and it wasn't until they built Japantown that the Japanese began to get that area back.


Hicke

It's interesting how these neighborhoods change.


Poole

Yes. You had this problem, which was that lots of people were very unhappy with the whole business of mass removal of people because they were who they were. I can remember them saying, "I guess the next time they come, they'll grab all of us up." I said, "Well, you never can say that they won't." That was the one thing that I never forgave Franklin Roosevelt for. Never. I thought it was such a horrible thing. I couldn't believe this.

They began to come back, and on Post Street, all those commercial structures had all been Japanese, except there were some changes made in them. So they got them back, and there was some conflict. A lot of the titles had passed, because they had foreclosed and the people were in the concentration camps. The redevelopment area was a good idea. These were terribly old structures. It was hard to think about. A lot of people just didn't even think about the Japanese.

I had a very good friend whose name was Moss Yanamura, and he had been one of those who had enlisted in that brigade that went overseas. He told me more about the inside of those concentration camps than I had ever known. These were the things that were going on in this city, and a lot of people were trying to do as much as they could with what the city was. There seemed to be very little difficulty in turning over large areas in the Western Addition to black people. In fact, they wanted to keep them out of the rest of the city.

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Gradually the Japanese began to come back. Of course there were a lot of them down in the valley. They had been farmers, and they had lost everything. The farmworkers—Cesar Chavez got that, and that was a much more militant struggle than a lot of people know. People in my situation of my generation were torn in a lot of different ways.


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When I was in the District Attorney's Office, people would be appalled that I would be up there negotiating with merchants. I used to tell them, "Go to hell." Pat Brown was the D.A. for about three years while I was there. Pat, of course, wanted to run for governor eventually. And when he became the attorney general, he was succeeded by Tom Lynch, a very sentimental and deep feeling Irishman. Tom never, never said a word of discouragement. People would say, "I remember telling the district attorney that I don't think this is part of your job." I'd say, "No, it's not really a part of my job, but I'm a citizen too, are you?"


Hicke

You're talking about now your involvement in this redevelopment.


Poole

The Board of Supervisors passed it.


Hicke

They approved the redevelopment plan?


Poole

They approved the redevelopment plan, along with some changes that they voted for, and the city attorney said that his office would do that, and we accepted that. That, we thought, was going to make some difference. But the years went by and they had never implemented it. Sporadic efforts to get going on it weren't successful.

In the meantime, I have been telling you about the employment or lack thereof. When the department stores and automboile sales places began to put these things up on the window saying they had equal employment, they treated everybody equal. They treated all people who were black equal, and they treated all who were white equal. [Laughter]

Then the young people came and sat in on automobile row. That was Van Ness Avenue. I was appalled at that. They were sitting in, for example, in the Chrysler place. They had these big Chrysler roadsters they were selling for the enormous amount in those days of about $6,000. They were sitting in there, and it was just a mess. We had meetings with Ben Swig. I must say, he was pretty active in this, and he asked us to come to a lot of meetings.


Hicke

Were you acting in an official capacity?


Poole

No, no.


Hicke

As a citizen?


Poole

That's all, just a citizen. We would meet with these people, and I remember that the general counsel of the Bank of America was at one of the meetings. I can't remember his name now. We used to


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see him at the symphony, and he was a very friendly guy. The Bank of America said, We're equal opportunity employers, we even have a manager who is—I'm not sure of the term. It wouldn't have been Afro American. I think black was sort of in at that time. So he was saying they had a manager. It was true, this guy was the manager of the Post-Fillmore branch, and that was the only one. You could go across this wide, wide land and you wouldn't find another one. We knew the manager, and we said, "You mean Chester?" He said, "Yes." I said, "He's the only one. Where else do you have one?" "Well, we're working on it."


Hicke

Could I just interrupt and ask, did you ask these questions as lightheartedly as you did just now? Or was this a serious sort of confrontational type of situation?


Poole

Oh, we were serious. We were trying to make use of the threat that a lot of these young people were protesting—without encouraging them to do it, but it was going to happen. We used to say to them, "We're not trying to take over your place, and we know that you have a business to run, but you'll have to run a business that treats people fairly. If you can't do that, you're going to have one hell of a time, and none of us can stop it. We don't have to start it, we just can't stop it." This went on, and we had meetings. As I said, we'd go to the Fairmont Hotel, and Ben and some his people were there—Cyril Magnin. It took a long, long time for the Fairmont to be the way it is now. You walk in the Fairmont now and you look behind the desk and you see people behind the desk of all races. They had one there in those days. He was a showcase. What we were really trying to do was to respond to a felt need.


Marin City

Poole

There was something I didn't finish. In World War II, they needed workmen, and here we were on the shores of the Pacific, and so they brought in a lot of workers that came in from Arkansas and Mississippi and Louisiana and that way, and they were building ships all along the bay up here—big merchant-men. Up at Mare Island they were doing the submarines. So they had these people and there was no place for them to stay within easy access. That's why the Housing Authority took over part of Marin City and built those places for them and eventually put those big towers over there.

So you had that going on, but it was later in the war, rather than earlier, when they started really getting a large number of


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labor people in there. Even at that, the labor unions didn't want to accept these workers into the labor unions. The person from whom we rented the house in San Francisco when we moved from Oakland, Joseph James, was a labor organizer. He was also a concert artist with a marvelous voice. Finally, he got an offer to come to New York and he couldn't refuse it. He left.

In fact, it started the year before we came to California. It started in 1945. There was a very famous case. It was something like James v. The Boilermakers. It wasn't that, but it was one of those seamen unions, and inside the union they had a separate black union. They went to the Supreme Court of California, and the Supreme Court of California said, You can't do that. If you're going to represent the union, you're going to have to represent the [whole] union, and you can't do part of it. That principle is really what started to open up jobs in the union activities. Harry Bridges and the longshoremen did it and had done it always. The Sailors Union of the Pacific did not, not for years. They were defiant.

Eventually, the war ended and there was no longer employment, because they weren't building any more ships. So a lot of these people were sitting over there, and they didn't have jobs anymore. So they converted a lot of the housing over in Marin City to the towers. That was a festering situation there, because you look up from those towers and see the fast traffic going into Sausalito and out across the bay. Then the Housing Authority decided to sell some of the adjacent land to some builders.


Hicke

In Marin?


Poole

In Marin. They had a little difficulty there because— This actually now will get you to the end of the sixties when that really happened. That may not be too relevant. I represented the builders over there. We joined with the secretary of Housing and Urban Development. They wanted to build this housing, and there were a group of people who insisted that they would have to make some provisions for low income people. So we eventually worked that out to the satisfaction of the Board of Supervisors in Marin County. They weren't satisfied. They really wanted more than they got.


Hicke

Who are "they"?


Poole

The people—they had some organization. They were all black people.


Hicke

Sort of a homeowners association?



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Poole

They didn't own the homes. This was owned by the Housing Authority. The Housing Authority conveyed the property to the builders, and the builders were required to do a satisfactory plan and agreed also to put in some housing for moderate income, but not for low cost. You had those stick houses and you had also the big towers over there, and that was always a festering source. The houses were built, including an apartment building, and the builders kept their word. They made provisions for moderate income people. If I had been smart, I could have exchanged my legal services from one point for one of the houses that was there, but I didn't see it at the time.

Marin had always been a community that discouraged black people from moving into the various cities as best they could. A friend of mine, who was a dentist, Daniel Collins, bought a house up on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais. It was said that the realtor said, "Dr. Collins has gotten in there, but nobody else is coming." That was the situation for a while. Now, if you have the money, you go in—you go there.


NAACP and National Urban League

Poole

There were two national organizations that I belonged to. I was a director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. That was after Thurgood Marshall had left the position of counsel. He was the head of that. In the Lyndon Johnson era, Lyndon Johnson appointed Marshall as solicitor general and then appointed him to the Supreme Court. He was succeeded by a fellow named Jack Greenberg. It was at that time I became one of the directors of the Legal Defense and Education Fund. So we had a great many interests in a great many places.

Also, I became one of the national trustees of the National Urban League. I was on that for six years.


Hicke

Can you give me some sample of your activities in those two groups?


Poole

The Legal Defense Fund had a very good working structure. Their component supporters were lawyers. They had affiliate lawyers in many places in the country. Well, you remember, it was that organization specifically that was engaged in the Brown v. Board of Education case that was decided in May 1954. They had a whole lot of not nearly so well known cases, but all over the South they were challenging the schools and the universities and reviewing


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the situations where they have a guy in a university class and he's sitting behind a big pillar, and that sort of thing.


Hicke

And they were challenging them in court?


Poole

Oh, yes. They were in court all the way.


Hicke

What were some of your problems?


Poole

I was a member of the board and one of their advisors, and they looked to us for input on both local as well as national things that we thought it was appropriate for them to become interested in.


Hicke

So a problem would come along and they would ask you whether they should go ahead with it?


Poole

Yes. We were the Board of Directors. There was a director, but we were the Board of Directors. We were dealing with professionals, so we took their judgment on a lot of things. It was quite interesting. They had scores of lawsuits going, and, of course, you'd often get to a place where you had to make some priority assessment. They always needed money, and lawsuits took a lot of money. They were affiliated with certain lawyers in certain places in California. Those people were like regional directors. And then there was also the NAACP. The Legal Defense Fund was established by the NAACP.


Hicke

Then it's kind of a separate entity?


Poole

Not at first. At first, it was the litigating part of the association. But then when they were passing the laws on nonprofit activities, then you had to be strictly nonprofit, and that wasn't a difficulty, but you had to keep the nonprofit records to qualify, and so it was determined that it was in the best interests of both the NAACP and of the Legal Defense Fund, which by that time was the tail wagging the dog almost, that they separate. The oldtimers on the NAACP believed that in doing so, there wouldn't be a whole lot of difference, but they didn't know Thurgood Marshall. They didn't know him well. There was a lot of anger. Gradually and eventually, it cut itself separate completely. That was an occasion of some bad feeling when that happened. There was always some question of whose side you are on.

When Charlotte, my wife, had gotten out of college, I think I told you, she had come to Pittsburgh and that's where we met; she was a newspaper woman, but she left and she went to New York and became the director of information of the NAACP. So I had strong


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ties, in fact I knew them all from the years before. When I later on opted to become a director of Legal Defense Fund, there was some murmuring, but it was the right place for me, and I did enjoy it. I was still a member of the Legal Defense Fund until I became a judge, then I had to get off of it.


Hicke

What about the Urban League?


Poole

I was a trustee of the Urban League, a national trustee of the Urban League, and I guess I was on the Urban League from 1969 until 1976—it could have been '75. When I became a judge, of course, I had to get off all of these things which had litigation components, and I knew that, and I did that. I was director of a couple of companies in addition to Levi Strauss.


Hicke

Which ones were those?


Poole

One was a firm that built fabricated housing, and I was also a director of the Redwood League of California. I enjoyed that because those people love trees like nothing else. I used to enjoy that very much, but they were always in court. So I had to resign from the Redwood League also.


American Bar Association

Hicke

You were in ABA I think. I don't know what you did.


Poole

The first thing I did for the ABA was to turn them down steadfastly when they wanted me join them. I said, I wouldn't be seen in the dead of night with you people. The reason was this. When I got out of law school, I took the Pennsylvania Bar, and it was supposed to be one of the tough bars in the country. It was kind of screwy. I took some instructions from an old fellow who had been doing this for years and years and years. He didn't have a cane, but you would think that maybe he should have had a cane. He was just strange, but he taught me all of these phrases, and they were in Latin. Now I knew Latin. I had taken three years of Latin—one year in high school and two years in mid-school when I was in college at Michigan, and then one year in Roman lyric poetry, which I loved.

I was a great lover of all kinds of lyrics—Browning, I took a course in Browning, I took a course in the Bible as literature. When I was notified that I had passed the Pennsylvania Bar, I also received an invitation to join the Pennsylvania Bar Association, but that was not a bar association like California's is. It is


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now, but it wasn't in those days. It was an association of lawyers.


Hicke

Informal?


Poole

Yes. They really had no actual responsibility to the state. They were just lawyers with their ethics and whatever it was. I was invited to join the Pennsylvania Bar Association and I did. I think that was the first and last time I ever saw it, but I got an invitation to join the American Bar Association.


Hicke

And pay your dues.


Poole

They sent me the invitation, yes. They were recruiting the young—

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They were recruiting. They had these recurrent recruiting campaigns. In Pennsylvania in those days, after you graduated from law school, you had to go through six months of a clerkship, and you would be a clerk for some judge or some lawyer or lawyer's office. They'd pay you a pittance. I think two months of it had to be after you had passed the bar, maybe it was four months. Altogether, it was a six-month clerkship. You had someone who was called your preceptor. He was going to teach you the precepts of the profession and all that. I was with a small firm, and they were good people. They were very good lawyers, and I did learn a lot from them at the time I was with them.

I was waiting for the day when I would finish that clerkship, because what I really wanted to do was to get into that New Deal business with Franklin Roosevelt's people. I got an invitation, as did some of my classmates—we exchanged communication with each other—to join the American Bar Association. I looked at it with some skepticism, because you had to fill out a card. On the card it listed a number of nationalities and racial groups in a little block on the side, and you had to check which one you were. One was full-blooded descent and loyal American citizen, one was American Indian, one was Asian Indian, and one was, I can't remember now whether it said Negro, I think that's what it said, or it could have said African descent, but there was no doubt what they meant.

I marked the box and sent it back with my $7.00 dues. You had to pay an admission fee. It wasn't a check, because I didn't have a checking account. It was a postal money order. In about three weeks, I got a letter from the ABA which said, "Dear Sir: We regret to inform you that the Committee on Admissions has not seen


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fit to accept your application." Heck, I knew what they said about the ABA. So that was that. I then went on about my business. I went to the National Labor Relations Board. I was there until I got the call to go to the military, and I went through my military service, and I did my forty-two months in the air force and came to California.

After I was appointed by Pat as an assistant D.A., a lot of the lawyers on Montgomery Street became aware of my existence, and so when they periodically had drives to get members, they would send a couple of their young lawyers with a spiel they would give you. They'd come over, and I'd have them sit down and they would tell me all of the advantages of ABA. I said, "Well, I appreciate that. Now, I'm going to tell you one." I would tell them the story I just told you. I said, "I needed the ABA in those days. I needed something to make me feel that I was really a lawyer. I had known that I was going to be a lawyer since I was about seven years old. I got the response all right, and that is enough for me to last all this time. So you go back to your office and tell your boss there what I told you." Then they would say, "You've got to help us break this." I said, "I don't have to help you break anything."

When I met my very good friend Jerome Shestach, who was a Philadelphia lawyer, a partner in a large law firm—the Segal firm they called it. Bernie Segal was active in the ABA, and they tried to get me to join the damn thing, and I told them that story. Bernie said, "Look, that was wrong, but what you have a chance to do now is to make some of this stuff go right. There's lots of room for you." There were lots of things in the ABA—it was almost like a feudal system.

One day I got a call from the ABA and they said, "We've been asked by Mr. Shestach to inquire if you would be a speaker at the ABA forthcoming convention." I said, "I don't know, I hadn't planned on it." They said, "He seemed to feel that you might do it and he said he would call you, and I'm just calling to ask you if I may send these materials to you." When Jerry called me, he said, "We want you to come to the meeting and we want you to give a talk on the program. We have this new section. It's a section of individual rights, and it's going to meet in Honolulu. We have already found out that if we invite you to do this, the Department of Justice will defray your expenses." [Laughter] He said, "You've got to do it." So, I went.


Hicke

Do you have some idea of about when this was?


Poole

Yes. This would have been 1966, I think it was. I went there, and they were nice people and everything. I was one of four


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speakers. They were all talking about the good things that could be expected from the functioning of this section of individual rights. It was a new section, and it was not favored by everybody, and there had been some opposition to its formation, but the Board of Directors had been persuaded, primarily by Bernie Segal and Chesterfield Smith and some of the others on there, that the ABA would either have to reach out and embrace lawyers or it surely would decline, and you can't live on what you used to do in the old days, and so forth. That kind of discussion was going on there too.

One of the other speakers—I can't remember his name now—was from Louisiana, and he got up and he wanted to placate things. He got us there and he was talking about how they treated the "Negras" around his way in Louisiana. It was more like it was the "Negras" that almost didn't get in there. I followed him [speaking], and I said, "He's going to have a hell of time getting on in the world the way it really is now if he can't even pronounce simple words like that. If you can't pronounce a word that is reminiscent of the derogatory terms in which most of your people, particularly when they're absent, speak of or think of [blacks], want to have anything to do with anything like that. If you're typical of it, I've got another problem with this thing."


Hicke

You departed from your speech?


Poole

Yes. He apologized. He was one of these good old boys from down South.


Hicke

Obviously oblivious to everything around him.


Poole

Yes. With some misgivings, I joined it.


Hicke

What was the reaction to your speech? What did you say, and what was the reaction?


Poole

In my speech I was talking about the reason why you don't get [black members]. They were telling me that the policy had changed, but they still couldn't get many black lawyers interested in it, and it took some time to do that. They didn't know why, so I told them why. I just told them that story of mine. I said, "Even when you want to bring a speaker in to address the assembly, it's got to be Ralph Bunch. It's not going to be somebody who has been struggling without your help at all."

Anyhow, I became pretty much known for my forthright—not for that speech particularly—but for my forthright responses to a whole lot of things. Jerry and I talked about it, and I said, "Jerry, I've been in too many trials to believe that you can get


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up on a policy of constant excoriation and win something. Sometimes, you've got to address the problem that it is, and you've got to be able to comprehend it in nonperjorative terms, and if you can't do that, eventually people get tired of you. They may not want to hear you anyhow, but you're taking a risk with me, because I can't tell when I'm going to tell somebody to go to hell. He can be president of the organization and it wouldn't make any difference to me. If I lose enough of my temper, I'll tell him that." He said, "Well, just let me know, and I'll join you." We went out and talked to Bernie Segal, and I told Bernie I would do it, so I did and I got along very well with them.


Hicke

What did you do besides just join? You were active in some of the—


Poole

Oh, yes. I joined the Section of Individual Rights. I also was invited to and joined the Criminal Law Section. I was one of the founders of the ABA's Section of Litigation, which is probably the biggest single section in the association now. I became the chairman of the Section of Individual Rights. Then I became a member of the House of Delegates—that's the operating part of it. Jerry said, "That's where you've got to get." Actually, I was tremendously flattered. When I would get up to speak, I always had a pretty good audience, and I didn't hold my tongue, but I wasn't there to cuss people out either.

I remember the first time I ever met Judge [Joseph T.] Sneed. Judge Sneed was the deputy attorney general in the Nixon administration—not during the whole time. He had been the dean of Duke University, I think it was. We were at a mid-winter meeting, I think it was in—I can't remember now—it was either Cleveland or in Dallas. The big item for discussion at that meeting in the House of Delegates was a proposal by a then fairly new lawyer, Mr. Bentson, Lloyd Bentson. He was a young Texan lawyer, and he was proposing a constitutional amendment to change the Fourth Amendment so that it would let police come in your house more freely. I was one of those they asked to respond to it in opposition. The top staff included the attorney general and the deputy attorney general of the Department of Justice. They were there. The solicitor general was there, and they were all speaking in pleading terms—it's time they get to this thing.

I think we had four of us, and when I got my time—[searches for book]. I thought it was in here. I'll tell you what it was. It was a book that consisted of the speeches of Dean Griswold, and they had been put into a bound book. It was a thing people read, then it finally came out in a paperback. It's around here someplace. It's just about eighty or ninety pages. I looked at


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him; he was sitting in the second row, I remember that, and I was in the front.

I said, "I didn't think that I would ever hear this kind of an argument coming from you, sir. I've always had a great deal of respect for you, and I read your book when it came out—"The Fifth Amendment" is the title, they were speeches by him on the Fifth Amendment: the part of the Bill of Rights without which the Constitution couldn't have been ratified—I said, "When they first printed that book, maybe I've forgotten, that book sold for about four dollars and a half. Eventually though, they put out a little paper book. So a lot of lawyers, in the every day necessity of making a living, didn't really have $4.50 to read your speeches, as much as they honored you. But they could buy it then. I bought it, and I read the whole thing from cover to cover. What you have said in there about the Fifth Amendment— You realize that you couldn't say that without adverting also to the Fourth Amendment, and you did, and you've inspired I don't know how many generations of young lawyers to believe in this Constitution. Not that a Constitution can't be changed, but the concept which is being argued is that we should change the concept to make it easier for the police to come in.

I said, "Maybe they'll never come into your house, probably not, but I couldn't say if I went home tonight that they wouldn't be coming into mine, and thousands and millions are in the same position. Lloyd Bentson may be a very bright man and he may have found the solution to how these people are getting away with something, because the police can't get to the evidence, but I'd a hell of a lot rather have a sign that said `You will not go past this mark without probable cause' than to have one say `Go where Mr. Bentson sends you.' Now, if that's the way it's going to be, we're going to be changing this world, but I don't think this organization, as conscious as it may be about the need—Nixon had been inducted into office—I don't think that we're going to do this. I don't believe it. I've looked into the faces of many of the delegates of this conference, and I believe they are every bit as concerned as I am about both the Constitution and this. But I will go down with them and not with you." I got a hell of an applause. We beat that thing down—we beat it.

I saw the dean, oh, a year later. Mrs. Griswold was not well. She was in a wheelchair, and he was pushing the chair. He stopped and he said [to Mrs. Griswold], "Last year he spoke against what I had to say in there, and he beat me." And he said to me, "I want to tell you something. You've made me do a lot of thinking about that. Right now, I'm glad you won. But you know, eventually, no matter what I think or you, that's what they're going to try to


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do." I said, "As long as they can't enlist you at the forefront of their battle, I'll be happy on that."


Hicke

That's interesting.


Poole

So as I say, I had a good stay in the ABA. But I became a judge. I still belong to the Section of Individual Rights. I still belong to the Judicial Section, and I still belong to the Litigation Section. I pay dues to them all, but when they were here a year and a half ago in San Francisco, I went to some of the meetings, and I got mixed up into a whole lot of things. Looking back on it now, I know that there are a lot of things that I probably still could have said and done in ABA, but as a judge, you can get yourself into a whole lot of commitments that you don't really want to that way. Although Jerry Shestach has tried very much to get my interest going again—he's going to run for president this time.


Hicke

You'll have to vote.


Poole

Oh, I'll vote. Oh, yes. I was still in it when I was on the district court, but I began to realize that I should not be looking forward to being back in the House of Delegates or anything like that again. But I can learn a whole lot from them, and so I was going to the last meeting. When they were in San Francisco, I went to those meetings. They met in Boston in February of this year. Then this summer, they met in New York. I didn't go to either of those meetings.


Hicke

Boston in the winter and New York in the summer. I don't know how they worked that out.


Poole

They meet in New York—I think it's every ten years. And when I was there, they used to go from New York to London, and they would meet with the British Bar there. I did it once with them.

In 1960, I challenged the Board of Realtors. We looked for a house—I think I was starting to tell you this about an hour ago—we looked for a house and we talked to a salesman on the phone. He was from a Market Street real estate company. We arranged to meet him, the next day was Saturday, I think it was. Yes, we were going to meet him Saturday morning at this place. We drove up to it, and he was sitting on the porch. He said, "Are you Mr. Poole?" And I said, "Yes." So he got off the porch, and he came and he said, "I'm sorry folks, I can't show you this house." I said, "Why not?" He said, "I'm a member of the San Francisco Real Estate Board, and they are members of the National Board of Realtors, and according to our code of ethics— You see, there are none of your kind of people living in this immediate area, and


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we're not permitted by our ethics code to introduce somebody in the neighborhood when there are none." I asked, "How does the first guy ever get there?" He said, "I don't know." But that's the way it was.

We went to another guy who took us to a house—all I remember about it is that it was a house that was in Forest Hills, and it wasn't too far from where Pat Brown lived. We were inside looking at the house and somebody came, and he opened the back door and said, "We've got to get out of here." I said, "What the hell do you mean, let's get out of here?" He said, "They're bringing some people in." I said, "What about it?" He said, "I'm not supposed to do this." So I said, "Do you think I'm going to run out the back door? You're crazy as hell." I said, "Come on Charlotte, let's go. We're going out the front, the way we came in." I said, "By the way, goodbye." There were people outside, and they looked.

##


Hicke

Let me just go back and ask you one more question about the ABA, looking back on the time since you joined. Can you tell me, just in general, about the changes that have taken place since you joined, and the ones especially that you had a major impact on?


Poole

For one thing, a lot of black lawyers and Japanese lawyers and others have joined and become active members in the association, and that's all to the good. There still is a tendency for black lawyers to have local associations that are— Did I tell you about the award I got the other day?


Hicke

No.


Poole

The Charles Houston Club, which is an association, which reminds me, they don't exclude whites. I said, "Well, tell me how many you've got in there." [Laughter]


Hicke

How many?


Poole

I don't know, I haven't seen them yet. They had this event over in Oakland. It was on Friday, the 20th, and they got it up without telling me they were doing it. It wasn't that it was a surprise, they just wanted to do it.


Hicke

You didn't have anything to say about it?


Poole

Right. When I heard about it, I said, "You did this for me? You already gave something." They said, "No." This was done about three years ago, you see. [Shows award certificates]



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Hicke

[Looking at certificates] Three years ago, this one says, "In recognition of your dedicated commitment to the rule of law and appreciation of the leadership and legal counsel that you have provided for over fifty years. We salute you." That's dated 1990. And then this one says, "The Charles Houston Bar Association commends The Honorable Cecil F. Poole for his judicial excellence and for his dedication and outstanding service to the community."


Poole

They said, "We're going to have Willie Brown to come and introduce you, and even if you don't come, he's going to do that."


Hicke

And here's one where he introduced a resolution into the [California State] Assembly honoring Cecil F. Poole.


Poole

He's the speaker of the House, so he didn't have a whole lot of trouble.


Hicke

There was no opposition. [Laughter]


Poole

I said, "I'll have to come." I had been to Santa Barbara. They had this on Friday; I came back from Santa Barbara on Thursday night, and we had the death case of Mason, the fellow who said he didn't want to resist it, so we sat up on Thursday night, the three of us who were on that panel. I think I left here about eleven o'clock at night. The next day we were going to have oral argument. On Friday, I told them, "I can't come. We've got this death case that's going to be there." They said, "Let somebody else speak for you. We can't put it back now."

Anyhow, Debbie [McIntyre, Poole's secretary] persuaded me, actually, that what I should do is go when we got through with oral argument, and the other two judges on there said, "That's fine. Why don't you do that? Then, when you get through, you can come back." So we heard the oral argument, and we heard about two hours of it, starting at 9:30. Then I went over to Oakland to one of the hotels over there, and they had a mob of people there. I was absolutely shocked. They had this great mob of people there. They knew why I was late coming.

I remember seeing Justice Stanley Mosk; he was there, and a lot of my old friends were there. Stan and I were good friends. I got to know him when he became the attorney general of California. He had been a superior court judge in Los Angeles. In the same election where Brown was elected governor, Stan was elected attorney general, and we worked very closely together. We became very good friends. He was there, and I saw one of my former law clerks was there. I don't know how in the heck she knew about it. Oh, I know, she's with the Coblentz firm now, and


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they had a table there. I said to Debbie, "I really needed this. I have a space on my wall that I have never covered yet."


Hicke

That's right. You need to put this one up. I think we've covered most of your extra activities then. So maybe we should stop for today. But let's make sure we cover all of your outside activities today, and then next time we'll start with the judgeship.


Travel

Poole

In 1977, Charlotte and I took a tour. We went over to Hawaii first, and then we went to Japan and we visited a number of the small cities. It was really interesting. You'd see a lot of the feudal buildings and castles. They are much more insular in these smaller cities than they are in Tokyo. We did that.


Hicke

Was this strictly sightseeing or did you talk to lawyers?


Poole

No. This was for us. It was sightseeing, yes. I've been to Japan about four times now. We went from there to Taiwan and were amazed at some of the things that Chiang Kai-shek was able to get out of mainland China when he fled from the Communists, including, where they have their Treasury, this huge emerald. It's this big [demonstrates three or four feet] and it's still in the natural rock. It's a huge thing. I said, "that can't be real, can it?" It was, and we saw all the things that they took. There was an art of collecting beads on things and making all kinds of designs without ever breaking it. There was a lot of it, and that apparently ran in families, people who were really good at it, and it became what they did.

Then we went over to Bangkok. At Bangkok they were having some riots. We were at a hotel called the D'Usethani, and it was at a crossroads like this [demonstrates], and the hotel was like this [demonstrates]. We were on about the fifth floor or sixth floor and we had a balcony, and these two crossroads converged, and martial law was to be declared at twelve o'clock. At 11:55 there were all kinds of vehicles. At twelve, in the area they would get farther and farther away, and then you'd hear nothing. Periodically, there would be shots. Charlotte didn't think that was so interesting. It was one heck of a thing then. Then we went up the klong, the river. I got a chance to imagine how it must have been for a lot of those people in the Vietnam War. They use these streams for everything, for rafting, for cleaning. I don't know how they can drink out of it.



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Hicke

They live on it, I've heard.


Poole

Yes. So we enjoyed that. The next year, which would be, I guess it was 1978, the president of the ABA, Bill Spann, contacted me and told me that he, as the president of ABA, had been invited to bring a delegation of twelve people to meet and interact with the mainland Chinese version of lawyers and judges. The government wanted us to come. The government of China—we'd be their guests. We would pay our expenses to China, but from then on, they'd take care of transportation and everything. At first, I wasn't going to do it. Charlotte said, "Of course you're going." I said, "I've been out that way." And she said, "You have never been to mainland China, you fool." [Laughter] I said, "You don't have to get so mad about it." She said, "Maybe I can go in your place." I said, "If I posed that to Mr. Bill Spann, he would say, `Oh, sure.' " Anyhow, so I went. There were twelve of us, and the group assembled in Los Angeles at a hotel down there. Unfortunately, my bag didn't go with us. My bag went to London.

We met that night. I knew everybody. There was the chair of the Section of International—something like that—and then there was the chairman of the House of Delegates—I knew all of these guys by that time, we were good friends—and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. I'll get my hands on these [pictures], but I think they are in some of my boxes and drawers; things that I haven't seen for years are still there.


Hicke

You've got a full archive somewhere, I'm sure.


Poole

Let me show you now. This is Ruth. Let me see. Someone took this picture in the hotel in Beijing, where we would meet with our friends for the day and plan the stuff.


Hicke

Are you taking these pictures?


Poole

No, somebody else took these.


Hicke

Did you take your camera?


Poole

Yes, I did, and I took pictures, but I have to dig them out. This is Leon Jeowarski, I know that. This is the Great Wall. I've got some other pictures. They're in this desk someplace.

I had known Ruth a good while. She had been a teacher at Columbia Law School, and I think for one semester she was at Harvard, but I think she was also at NYU [New York University]. I had seen her since then a number of times; she was appointed by Carter to the District of Columbia Circuit Court, and I would see her periodically. We weren't close friends, but we were


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acquaintances. We enjoyed that trip. Actually, we spent a lot of time with the vice chairman of the Party, and he and his people would come. They would meet with us. We had discussions. They would be challenging.


Hicke

What would you talk about?


Poole

What they insisted upon was that they had been well on the road to a viable legal system when the war broke out.


Hicke

Which war?


Poole

This was the war in which Chiang Kai-shek ruled the country. They overthrew him, and he and his people fled to Taiwan.


Hicke

That was right after World War II.


Poole

Right after World War II. There had been such disruption there, that in order to gain control of the country against the machinations of the people who were still plotting to overthrow the ones now at Taiwan, they had to kind of forego the development of these legal institutions, but they realized that it was a big world out there, and they had much to give and much to receive, and they wanted to discuss these things with us. You would think it would be some professional. No, no, the vice chairman was doing that. They were funny, and they wanted to talk. They wanted to talk in terms of how the United States could facilitate the importation of more goods, without being so finicky about the different things.


Hicke

They wanted to talk about trade?


Poole

Trade, yes, and the professors, for example, were very interested in such things as codes for tariffs, codes for determining allocations of goods and services, what we might be able to do to make it possible in our legal system for this to be a better world, because we would have these things available to us. They weren't dumb. They were smart as hell. We would talk about them afterwards. There was quite a bit of flying around the country. They provided all the transportation. We were flying in these Russian planes. Actually, that's where I got my silk painting of the Bundt. That's a thoroughfare down there on the waterfront, see. This is silk. This is a woven tapestry. I got it there and had it framed when we got back.

Then I had one also of a place that's called the Lake of the West. That's their Riviera. It's inland some distance. We had a marvelous time. We went to the Great Wall up there, and we went on one of their boats that took us down the Yellow River.


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Actually, they did everything they could to be good hosts to us. We went to the summer palaces of the emperors. All in all, we were there for twenty days.


Hicke

Did anything substantive come out of this trip?


Poole

There were a few articles written, but nothing much of anything to remember. Ruth was trying to write something I remember, and she did do something that she once circulated, but it had not yet been refined. One of the things I'll tell you about the trip—when I went to get my passport to go on this trip, the Chinese Consul's office wouldn't accept my passport because it was from the year before.


Hicke

Oh, a stamp from Taiwan.


Poole

Yes, so they gave it to me separately. That was a very enjoyable trip.


Hicke

Maybe this is a good place to stop for this time.


About this text
Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb4779n9p8&brand=oac4
Title: Civil rights, law, and the federal courts : oral history transcript : the life of Cecil Poole, 1914-1917 / Cecil F. Poole
By:  Poole, Cecil F., 1914-1997, Interviewee, Coblentz, William K, Author, Hicke, Carole. ivr, Interviewer
Date: 1997
Contributing Institution: The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/
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