M.J. Perry Jr., Legal Pioneer, Dies at 89
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Matthew J. Perry Jr., who as a young lawyer had to wait in the balcony of his segregated local courthouse before a judge would hear his case, then went on to win hundreds of civil rights legal battles and to become the first black federal judge from the Deep South, died on July 29 at his home in Columbia, S.C. He was 89.
His family confirmed the death.
In the 1950s and ’60s, Judge Perry handled cases for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People that resulted in the desegregation of schools, colleges, hospitals, parks, golf courses, restaurants and beaches. He won rulings by the United States Supreme Court that overturned the convictions of more than 7,000 people involved in sit-ins.
The Harvard Law School professor Randall L. Kennedy said Judge Perry “helped create federal law that enlarged our liberty.” The judge’s cases, he said, are taught “in every law school across the United States.”
Morris Rosen, who years earlier unsuccessfully defended the city of Charleston, S.C., in a lawsuit brought by Mr. Perry, put it more simply: “He beat the hell out of me.”
In 1976, Mr. Perry became the second black and the first from the Deep South to be appointed to the United States Military Court of Appeals, a three-member civilian body that hears appeals of courts-martial. He was appointed by President Gerald R. Ford.
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter named him to a new seat on the Federal District Court in South Carolina, making him that state’s first black federal judge.
The victories Mr. Perry won, often in collaboration with other N.A.A.C.P. lawyers, included desegregating Clemson University and the University of South Carolina; forcing South Carolina to reapportion its legislative districts to end discrimination against blacks; and winning the release of more than a dozen men from death row.
In 1955, Mr. Perry represented a woman who had been elbowed by a bus driver for trying to exit through the whites-only front door. She lost her suit against the bus company, but Mr. Perry won an appeal in a case that had echoes later that year when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Ala.
Mr. Perry’s success as a civil rights lawyer was owed in part to his conscious effort to avoid provoking confrontations. When shepherding the admission of Harvey Gantt to Clemson, he “carefully scripted” every step of the admission process with law enforcement officials, he said in an interview in January in The South Carolina Lawyers Weekly.
In the early 1960s, a judge cited Mr. Perry for contempt because of his aggressive defense of a black teacher who had been charged with trespassing after sitting in a hospital waiting room designated for whites. He was permitted to return to the courtroom after assuring the judge he meant no disrespect.
“The judge did a remarkable thing,” Judge Perry told The New York Times in 1976. “He apologized to me. He said he had observed that if he were of my race, he would represent the causes I did with even more vigor than I did, and that he hoped I would accept his apology.”
In the book “Matthew J. Perry: The Man, His Times, and His Legacy,” edited by William Lewis Burke and Belinda Gergel, Robert Carter, himself an important civil rights lawyer and later a federal judge, wrote of Judge Perry in an essay, “He is the only militant civil rights figure I know who seems to be loved by both racial groups while still engaged in the struggle.”
Matthew James Perry Jr. was born Aug. 3, 1921, in Columbia, where he grew up. His father, a tailor, died when he was 12, and his mother went to work in New York City as a seamstress. Matthew lived with a grandfather and helped support the family by digging ditches and doing odd jobs. He was drafted into the Army and served in an all-black unit during World War II.
“I accepted our plight as a fact of life,” he said of the segregation in an interview with The Spartanburg Herald-Journal in July, “and yet I knew it wasn’t right.”
A pivotal moment in his racial thinking occurred when he was home on furlough from the Army. He was forced to order his lunch from a restaurant window. Inside he could see Italian prisoners of war being served by waitresses.
He studied business administration at what is now South Carolina State University, a historically black institution. He then enrolled in its law school, which had been created after the University of South Carolina’s law school resisted pressure to admit blacks.
One of five members of his law school’s second graduating class, Mr. Perry went on to practice law in Spartanburg, S.C., where he was the only black lawyer. If he believed in a case, he might charge nothing, or accept fresh vegetables and home-baked pies as payment. In the mid-1950s, he became chief counsel of the South Carolina Conference of Branches of the N.A.A.C.P.
Mr. Perry was sworn in as a federal judge by Justice Thurgood Marshall of the Supreme Court. Three decades earlier, Mr. Perry had been inspired to pursue a legal career after watching Mr. Marshall argue two civil rights cases in Columbia.
Mr. Perry’s nomination to the military appeals court was pushed by Senator Strom Thurmond, a South Carolina Republican, even though Mr. Perry was a member of the Democratic National Committee. Political analysts at the time suggested that Mr. Thurmond, a staunch segregationist, backed Mr. Perry to win votes from a growing black electorate.
On the military appeals court, Judge Perry gained a reputation as thoughtful and “unflappable,” said Eugene R. Fidell, a lawyer who argued before Judge Perry and now teaches at Yale.
In 1974, Mr. Perry was defeated as the Democratic candidate for a seat in the United States House of Representatives; Jimmy Carter, then governor of Georgia, visited South Carolina to campaign for him. When Mr. Carter became president, he appointed him to the lower federal district court.
Judge Perry never retired. He continued as a senior judge and was working on the day he died. He is survived by his wife, the former Hallie Bacote; and their son, Michael.
In his hardscrabble years as a young lawyer, Judge Perry was rejected by potential black clients because they feared he might irritate a white judge. On out-of-town cases, he was barred from motels and had to drive home to sleep, no matter the distance. And while awaiting his turn to appear before a judge in his hometown courthouse in Spartanburg, he, along with other blacks, was restricted to the balcony.
In 2004, the federal courthouse in Columbia was named after him.
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