Work in Progress: The Judge's Chambers

Work in Progress is a recurring feature on CAMPAIGN TRAILS for paid subscribers.

I’m using it to share some of the more interesting materials I’ve uncovered in the past few years of research for my book-in-progress on the work of John Doar and the Civil Rights Division in the 1960s.

I just wrapped up a draft of the fourth chapter, which focuses on some of the voting registration campaigns that the Department of Justice pushed in the early 1960s.

The Doar Papers have more evidence from these campaigns than I could ever cover, but one lawsuit I wanted to follow closely was a pivotal one they waged against the notorious discrimination practiced by the larger-than-life Registrar Theron C. Lynd in Forrest County, Mississippi.

The case of United States of America v. Theron C. Lynd was unusually drawn out, thanks to the hostile involvement of District Court Judge Harold Cox, a notorious racist who did everything he could to slow and stall the case. Things eventually got so bad that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals took the extraordinary step of basically sitting as a trial court and re-hearing the considerable evidence in the case against Lynd.

In June 1962, Judge Griffin Bell — a brand-new appointee to the Fifth Circuit, who would later serve as Jimmy Carter’s attorney general — invited the parties in the case to his chambers to discuss the trial planned for the fall.

Bob Owen was there representing the Civil Rights Division. A garrulous Texas native with a wicked sense of humor, Owen had recently informed an alumni publication at Princeton that his job was “selling an unwanted product mostly in Mississippi.”

Luckily for us, Owen took notes on the meeting, and they reveal a good bit about the way civil rights cases were handled.

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