JOHN WALKER (1937-2019): A FIGHTER WE KNEW

As Thanksgiving approaches, we step back and honor the life and work of John Walker, the Arkansas civil rights lawyer and state representative who died October 28 at age 82. Walker's work had national implications. All three of us knew him in some way. We mourn his loss for different reasons. 

John Walker grew up in Rob's hometown of Hope, AR where he lived until 1952 when he left for Texas and high school graduation in Houston. He returned to Arkansas for an undergraduate degree from Woodson's AM&N College. After graduate school at New York University, he earned his law degree in 1964 at Henry's Yale University.   

Walker opened a Little Rock law practice in 1965. He won a seat in the Arkansas legislature in 2010, serving until his death. We remember him for the years between starting that practice and his death. 

Henry's Memories 

It was an audacious idea hardly anyone would have believed if I'd made it up. Ten years after John Walker told me, then a wet-behind-the-ears freshman at Yale, he planned on starting a civil rights law firm in Arkansas and I should attend law school and join him, I found myself doing just that. John and his wife invited me to dinner one spring night in 1964 when he made that seemingly ridiculous suggestion. He was only graduating from Yale himself that semester.

While practicing with him, first at Walker, Kaplan, and Mays, then at Walker, Hollingsworth, and Jones, I witnessed and played a small part in changing life for minorities and women in Arkansas and elsewhere in America. John, his partners, and associates made a difference still not fully calculated. Thousands of lives improved because of the work those lawyers did under John's leadership. 

He possessed a brilliant legal mind, thought faster on his feet, and more effectively organized large volumes of information than

any lawyer I observed during my years of clerking in the federal courts or in practice. He used his skills in carrying out his mission of wringing justice and fairness from a flawed system. He was my friend and I am grateful for the opportunity he gave me to participate in a cause I hold dear. Little did I know his outlandish suggestion in 1964 was just another of his bold, but accurate, predictions.
  

Woodson Cried

I cried when I learned of John's death. Though I am grateful for what he did for me, that's not why I cried. I cried for what racism robbed him of.

  

After he hired me in August 1976 we toured downtown Little Rock in his powder-blue

1974 Lincoln Continental for a private conversation. He was 40. I was 26. He sought to boost my self-confidence by telling me he believed my having graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School meant that I was one of the smartest lawyers in Little Rock. I was not convinced, though I appreciated the gesture. 

  

Soon, I assisted him in a murder trial in Conway, where I witnessed one of his signature trial tactics. On the morning of the trial he made a plethora of oral motions to the utter consternation of the judge and prosecutor. The prosecutor wilted under the pressure and offered John's indigent black client a deal, allowing him to plead to a lesser offense and receive probation. The defendant

later became a millionaire businessman. John introduced me to employment discrimination law when he dispatched me to Crossett in the spring of 1977 to interview class members for weeks in the Georgia Pacific case. The case eventually settled.

I cried because living in a racist society had cheated John, as it had my own father, of the opportunity to be whatever he wanted to be, as opposed to what he felt compelled to be. My father wanted to become a millionaire farmer. It was not to be. He was restricted to being a farmer in the hills of Conway County because the alluvial farmlands in the county were reserved for white farmers. In the same way, John

became a civil rights lawyer because becoming a business tycoon, law professor in a major university, or federal judge were not realistic opportunities for him. When others celebrate him as a civil rights advocate, I fight feelings of anger that because of racism he did not feel the freedom to do something else.

Will the day ever come when there will no longer be a need to celebrate fighters against racism? Not knowing the answer to that question is why I cried.  

Rob's Recollections 

Even though we hailed from the same town, I knew John Walker less well than my colleagues. We never worked together; indeed, I wasn't a lawyer when I lived in Little Rock and watched him from afar. That didn't keep me from admiring his work or appreciating that America requires people like him.  

John Walker took on powerful forces, using the tool those forces couldn't control - our national dedication to the rule of law. By fighting segregated schools, employment discrimination, and wrongs in criminal justice,

John Walker made Arkansas better. In his sliver of the world, he used the law in holding the system accountable.  

Ironically, I saw Walker up close in one of his losing battles. In 1977, he took on the Arkansas Razorback football establishment.

In those days, the team won a lot and enjoyed sacred cow status. Walker challenged coach Lou Holtz's suspension of three black players over a dormitory incident involving a white woman. As a sportscaster at a Little Rock television station, I covered the story closely.  The players remained suspended, a threatened boycott by other black players fizzled, and Walker lost his court challenge. Still, the fact Walker took on the case inspired respect I hold until this day. 

THE HEARINGS: IN PRAISE OF OUR CONSTITUTION

America got a civics lesson last week as three patriots testified before the House Intelligence Committee's impeachment probe into President Donald J. Trump. There, before the television cameras, the country saw how the Constitution was designed to work.  Whatever flaws the    230

year-old document had at its inception and, for that matter, still has, the nation got a tutorial in what’s right about it. Americans could say at week’s end maybe things haven’t gone to hell in a handbasket after all.  Maybe the system of checks and balances works.

State Department official George Kent, the

Kent, Taylor, and Yovanovitch preparing to testify at  Trump impeachment hearing

current U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor, and former  Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch told much the same story in their riveting testimony. Trump held up U.S. military aid in an attempt to bribe Ukraine's president into announcing an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and a discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election. Only the most partisan Trump backers now contend the President didn’t engage in attempted bribery.   

The Scene

When Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Cal) convened the hearings Wednesday, the

impeachment inquiry moved into a new phase. Committee members knew what the witnesses would say because those witnesses had given sworn testimony in closed-door depositions. Now, it was showtime, so the American people could see what the investigators had found.

The hearings aimed at the key audiences in this saga. A vote in the House impeaching Trump now seems a foregone conclusion. Whether he stays or goes, therefore, depends on potentially persuadable Republican senators who might support ousting Trump and swing voters (the 15-25% of the country that doesn’t have its mind made up) whose support for conviction might produce those Republican votes in the Senate.

The Witnesses

Kent and Taylor, men with long histories of unflappable, professional

government service in administrations headed by both Democrats and Republicans demonstrated personal appeal and exhaustive knowledge of the subject at issue and of their Ukraine jobs. Both challenged Trump's credibility in

ways that arguably overcame the inherent power of his office. Both eschewed politics, making Republicans look small in trying to paint them as partisan hacks.

It was Yovanovitch who, thanks in part to an insane blunder by Trump, ended the first round of hearings as a star.  When she left the hearing room Friday after, the crowd erupted in spontaneous applause, sending chills down the spines of Americans across the nation. During her testimony, Trump attacked Yovanovitch

in a mean-spirited Tweet, blaming her for unrest in Somalia, one of the early stops in her 33-year career as a foreign service officer. Schiff read her the Tweet and she acknowledged she found it “very intimidating.”

 

Schiff told her some members of Congress "take witness intimidation very, very seriously," a hint an

article of impeachment might well include that charge. Commentators and legal observers noted that a specific provision of the United States Code forbids witness intimidation. Not long after

Trump’s Tweet, a federal jury convicted long time Trump associate Roger Stone of witness tampering and six other felonies carrying a potential prison sentence totaling fifty years.

If the testimony of Kent, Taylor, and Yovanovitch wasn’t enough, a development late Friday made things even worse for Trump and his allies. When Taylor testified Wednesday, he revealed he’d just learned that a member of his embassy staff overheard Trump on a phone call with U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland talking about seeking an investigation into Biden and the 2016 election allegations.  Taylor hadn’t known of the call when he gave his deposition.

        

The staff member surfaced Friday night, appearing for his own deposition and offering an opening statement describing the call he overheard. David Holmes’s account of the call torpedoed one Republican defense – that witnesses like Taylor, Kent, and Yovanovitch had only provided “hearsay,” since they hadn’t actually heard Trump seeking the investigations. 

The Genius of Our Constitution

We will in the future say more about the meaning of the constitution and its role in this impeachment exercise. Suffice it to say now that what we've seen demonstrates the hope and the cynicism embedded in the document.  Donald Trump is being held to account because the framers set up a system that recognized the difficulty in dealing with a corrupt, lawless leader. The past week demonstrates that as perhaps never before. 

 

The hope in the constitution lies in the fact it contains the tools for dealing with someone like Trump. Congress checks the executive branch through institutional mechanisms like the power of the purse, the oversight function, and, ultimately, impeachment. Though Trump has tried frustrating the process by preventing his lieutenants from testifying, career public servants in the executive branch like Kent,

Taylor and Yovanovitch defied him and testified anyway.  The framers no doubt understood personal courage would come into play a some point. If Trump wins re-election, we wonder if he will push these brave men and women out of public service and replace them with enablers willing to do his bidding.

There is more. Bad actors sometimes require a cynical approach, meaning the courts and criminal prosecution have their roles, as the Roger Stone verdict demonstrates.  Where would the Watergate-based impeachment of Richard Nixon have been without the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in the Nixon v. United States tapes case? 

 

Our constitution wasn’t and isn’t perfect. This isn't the place for expounding on the

evil of the three-fifths compromise and other flaws. We can get to them later.  This is the place, however, for pointing out that what

we saw last week shows why this nation has survived as long as it has and maybe why we’ll survive the calamity of the Trump presidency.