George Barrett, the Irish-American civil rights lawyer who led crucial legal battles to combat racial discrimination in the southern United States, has died aged 86.
Born into a working-class Irish Catholic family in Nashville, Tennessee, Barrett assumed a leading role in the struggle for racial justice in the South. His grandfather had worked laying railroads in the South, like many Irish in the late 19th century.
His great-grandfather had emigrated from Ireland in the fateful year of 1847. Barrett often recalled how the experience of growing up as an Irish- American Catholic gave him first-hand experience of discrimination and exclusion. This gave him a natural empathy for the plight of African-Americans and led to his lifelong commitment to racial equality and the rights of working people.
The Nashville lunch-counter protests attracted nationwide attention in the US and became one of the seminal protests of the civil rights movement of the late 1950s. Students were beaten at the segregated lunch counters in downtown department stores that refused to serve African Americans.
Barrett was one of the first and very few Caucasian lawyers to represent and defend the protesters in the criminal cases taken against them. He explained his motivation to The Tennessean newspaper: "I saw the tough guys going after the black kids. But we knew that when they were through with the black kids they'd come for us Catholic kids, so we had to stand up to them together."
He was convinced the civil rights movement needed lawyers as much as protesters. He believed you had to decide what part you wanted to play and being a lawyer meant focusing on the legal work. He told The Irish Times in 1997 the courts "were ahead of the legislature and the people" at that time.
University desegregation
His most famous case,
Geier v Tennessee
, was a victorious campaign to desegregate Tennessee universities. It began in 1968 and sought to ensure publicly funded higher education in Tennessee was open to African- Americans on an equal basis to whites. It ran for 38 years.
It became a lengthy journey through federal court orders and attempted settlements and culminated in a final resolution in 2006 when Barrett could declare that race had been eliminated as a factor in determining higher-education placements. The case was used as a template for challenges to segregated publicly funded education throughout the South.
Former US vice-president Al Gore said on his passing: “Our state and our nation have lost a great lawyer and an even better man.” US vice-president Joe Biden said: “He spent his life selflessly serving the people of Tennessee.”
A lifelong Democrat, he more recently challenged voter ID laws in his home state without success. He saw their introduction as an attempt by the Republican Party to disenfranchise African-American voters. In 2010 he succeeded in having the death sentence of a woman who had spent 25 years on death row commuted.
George Barrett was educated in Spring Hill College, Alabama, and graduated with a law degree from Vanderbilt University in 1957. He had previously studied economics and politics at Oxford University. In 1967 he formed the first integrated law firm in the US central south.
Barrett was proud of his Irish heritage and for the last 20 years of his life allowed himself time to visit Ireland at least once a year. Not as a tourist, however. Rather, he visited to deliver lectures on civil rights and labour law and to immerse himself in the legal and political life of this country. He spoke as a guest of a wide range of institutions and organisations including Trinity College Dublin, Flac and the Bar Council.
He enjoyed nothing more than to motivate law students and lawyers in Ireland with the lessons he had learned over decades of pioneering legal practice. Those lessons were always delivered with a combination of wisdom and an outrageous sense of humour. He once admonished a questioner who referred to someone as “my friend in politics” with the put- down: “There are no friendships in politics! There are merely shifting alliances.”
He was utterly partisan and unapologetic about his own politics. He urged anyone visiting Nashville “never go to Williamson County” as it was a county that had “more Republicans than people”. He argued constantly that big business exerted excessive influence in western countries – and he liked to explain how “insurance companies exist for only two reasons: one, to collect premiums; two, to deny claims”.
He enjoyed an ever-expanding group of friends and colleagues in Ireland, particularly among the legal profession and the judiciary. Peter Ward SC delivered one of the eulogies at his funeral service at the Cathedral of the Incarnation, Nashville, on August 30th.
He is survived by his three daughters, Lucy, Mary and Katie who, together with their husbands and children, all shared in George Barrett’s delight in setting fresh roots in Ireland.