Melvyn R. Leventhal

Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal (born March 18, 1943) is an American attorney known for his work as a community organizer and lawyer in the 1960s–70s Civil Rights Movement. From 1969 to 1974 he served as the Lead Counsel in Mississippi for the Legal Defense Fund, the litigation arm of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). After returning to New York, he served as a staff attorney for LDF for several more years. He also practiced business law.

He and Black author Alice Walker of Georgia married in New York City in 1967. They were known after their return to Mississippi as the first legally married interracial couple in the state; they had a daughter together.

Early life and education

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York City, Leventhal attended a yeshiva elementary school and Brooklyn Technical High School. When he was nine years old, his parents divorced. He and his siblings were split between their parents; the father took Leventhal's older brother to live with him, and the younger children remained with their mother.

Leventhal recalled that he rarely saw his father after that. On one occasion, Leventhal as a teenager took a younger sibling to see their father, who "slammed the door in our face".

In Leventhal's formative years he was greatly influenced by Judaism's emphasis on community service. In particular he recalls being "outraged and disgusted by the way people treated Jackie Robinson", the first African American to integrate a major baseball team.

He resolved to fight injustice, and in pursuit of this, after earning his undergraduate degree from New York University's Washington Square College in 1964, he went to law school. He received a J.D. from the New York University School of Law in 1967.

Early career and marriage

As a young lawyer, Leventhal worked in Mississippi for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (“LDF”). From this work he formed the first interracial law partnership in the state's history, with Reuben V. Anderson, Fred L. Banks Jr., and John A. Nichols. Anderson and Banks later became the first two African-American justices of the Mississippi Supreme Court.

Through his work, Leventhal met the writer Alice Walker. She came to trust and admire him due to his willingness to endanger his own social status and well-being by standing up to bigotry. On March 17, 1967, Leventhal and Walker married in New York, in a civil ceremony performed by Family Court Judge Justine W. Polier. At that time, the interracial marriage was illegal in Walker's home state of Georgia.

When the couple returned to Mississippi in July 1967, they were the first legally married interracial couple in the state. Walker and Leventhal had one child, Rebecca Walker. They divorced in 1976.

Career

During spring, summer and winter recesses from law school, Leventhal had worked as a student volunteer at LDF's offices in Jackson, Mississippi, supervised by activist Marian Wright Edelman. He served as LDF's liaison to Martin Luther King, Jr., during the June 1966 Meredith March Against Fear from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson.

From 1969 to 1974, Leventhal served as LDF's lead counsel in Mississippi. He represented plaintiffs in approximately 75 lawsuits filed throughout the state to challenge segregation and discrimination in public schools, employment, public accommodations, housing and municipal services (e.g., street paving, street lighting and fire protection). He helped enforce provisions of federal civil rights legislation that had been passed in 1964 and 1965, as well as court rulings to end school segregation.

Leventhal and Walker separated, and he moved back to New York in 1974. There he continued to work for LDF as a staff attorney, litigating cases brought in Mississippi and other states. His ten-year career at the LDF was highlighted by three landmark cases:

• Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, 396 U.S. 19 (1969), in which the Supreme Court of the United States brought an end to the era of "all deliberate speed", by which they had recommended states undertake change after their ruling in 1954. In 1969 they ordered school districts to desegregate "at once".
• Norwood v. Harrison, 413 U.S. 455 (1973), in which the Supreme Court of the United States held unconstitutional state textbook assistance to private schools that discriminate on the basis of race.
• Hawkins v. Town of Shaw, 437 F.2d 1286 (5th Cir. 1971), affirmed on rehearing en banc, 461 F. 2d 1171 (5th Cir. 1972), in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld lawsuits challenging racial discrimination in the provision of municipal services.

Leventhal also testified before the U.S. Senate's Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity in 1970 on the progress of school desegregation in Mississippi.

Later public service career

Between 1979 and 1984, Leventhal served first as the Assistant Attorney General of the State of New York, in charge of the Consumer Frauds and Protection Bureau. He next was appointed as the Deputy First Assistant Attorney General of New York and Chief of the Litigation Bureau.

Leventhal has argued two cases before the Supreme Court of the United States, Norwood v. Harrison, 413 U.S. 455 (1973, argued in 1972, as noted above) and Blum v. Stenson, 465 U.S. 886 (1984, argued in 1983).

He remarried after his divorce.