Equal Justice Under the Law
Mining the Archives
Equal Justice Under Law.
Legal Aid was created in 1964 as part of the War on Poverty legislation. The Office of Economic Opportunity provided money to set up offices to provide legal services to the poor in non-criminal cases. It was an attempt to give lower income citizens a chance at equal justice.
Travis County quickly applied for funds and a series of offices were established. Page Keeton, dean of the UT Law School, was instrumental in making it happen. Rumors have it that Dean Keeton worked behind the scenes in a lot of the key moments in activist Austin in the 1960s. PHIT plans to procure a copy of the oral history of Dean Keeton in the hopes of finding some of those forgotten bits of history.
Let me please note that the early days of the creation of Travis County Legal Aid was neither easy nor trouble-free. Local lawyers pushed back, worried about loss of income and clients. Conservative politicians worried about the impact of low income folks actually having honest legal representation in those hot-button issues of public housing, urban renewal and highway construction.
Divorce lawyers especially opposed the formation of Legal Aid. They thought Legal Aid would steal all their business. Actually, it turned out to be a boon for them. Legal Aid defended the women, who had no money. The establishment lawyers defended the men, who had the money. John Scanlan told PHIT that a lot of Legal Aid’s work early on was spent in clearing up the legal standing of quite a few Austin women. And the divorce lawyers were able to charge their male clients a lot of money. Boom times!
Legal Aid was not permitted to offer criminal legal defense, but there were certainly lots of opportunities to make life a bit easier for the lower income population.
PHIT conducted a series of interviews with Legal Aid lawyers in the early 2000s while filming the documentary called the “Law Firm for the Poor,” as Legal Aid came to be known.
John Scanlan was one of those interviewees.
We asked Scanlan why he wanted to work for this not-for-profit and…well… not terribly lucrative Law Firm For the Poor.
He explained that he saw a real opportunity to do law reform.
“The Warren Court was open to those sorts of cases. And it is a lawyer’s dream to argue in front of the Supreme Court.” Currently, the Supreme Court might be considered more of a nightmare, but times change and hopefully they will change again.
Scanlan was involved in several of the major cases that consumed Austin in the 60s and 70s and the resolution of which ultimately determined the future development of the city. A couple of those prominent issues was Urban Renewal and Public Housing.
Austin in the 60s had three public housing units. Those units were truly historical. LBJ was the representative for Austin in the 1930s and LBJ strongly supported FDR and both strongly supported public housing. The Public Housing Act was passed in 1937, which provided money for low cost public housing.
LBJ pushed hard for Austin to get some of first of those projects. And LBJ got what he wanted, even in the 1930s. The first projects under the Public Housing Act was built here in Austin. Rosewood Courts was also the first African American public housing unit ever built in the USA.
That made Rosewood Courts historical. Some of you might remember that there were some complicated issues when it was recently renovated. It needed to be rebuilt. But… it was in the Historical Registry. But… it was built in the 1930s. It was in shambles and it wasn’t air-conditioned. But… it was historical. So the whole thing became messy and complicated.
But that is not the story for today’s PHIT substack. We want to step back a little further in time.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Urban Renewal was tearing down most of East Austin. Specifically, Glen Oaks and Blackshear were designated for Urban Renewal. [see the substack on the Blackshear effort]
But a nagging little obstacle was that National Urban Renewal Law said that there had to be replacement housing available before Urban Renewal could destroy low income houses. There wasn’t any in Austin. Somewhere in the city files is a classic question by a victim of Urban Renewal. “I live in slum housing. You bought my slum house and paid me what slum housing is worth. And then you tear down the slum housing. Where am I supposed to buy replacement slum housing, which is all I can afford to buy?” There is a certain inescapable logic in the question.
Sooo…The Austin Housing Authority planned to build some additional low-income units. That would allow the city of Austin to complete the process of razing East Austin and finish Urban Renewing East Austin.
There was one little problem. Rosewood Courts was allocated for African-Americans. Santa Rita Courts were allocated for Mexican-Americans. Chalmers Court was the Anglo-American project.…i.e, the public housing units were deliberated segregated. And, in those days, the Federal Government was spending money busing students around the city to de-segregate the schools.
Scanlan, who filed the suit to stop the new construction, explained to PHIT by quoting a 1938 resolution by the city of Austin to build the new public housing.
“Rosewood Courts would be near the Negro playground, and would be primarily for Negroes. Santa Rita Courts would be in the Hispanic neighborhood, near the Hispanic playground and the Hispanic schools for Hispanics. And then Chalmers was for whites, and Chalmers at the time was a little bit closer to the highway than Rosewood or Santa Rita courts, and it was for essentially low income whites. And so we didn't have to prove that the segregation in these projects was, you know, unintentional. The City Resolution to establish the projects said it clearly.”
“The new housing units were going to be out near the Govalle wastewater treatment plant. It was right across the highway from it and the plant malfunctioned about half the time, so it always smelled like a sewer. It also happened to be right at the end of the major runway at Bergstrom [the Air Force Base was located where the current commercial Austin-Bergstrom airport is]. And Bergstrom had a squadron of phantom jets at the time, who when they came into land, they were noisy as the devil. In fact, the noise level was so high that it was above what they call the speech interference level meaning if the jets had flown over us at this moment, we couldn't communicate with one another. And it was obviously in the segregated part of town.”
“I mean, you don't have to be a space scientist to understand that if you're going to build another segregated housing project in East Austin, you're only going to be required to do more busing. So one arm of the federal government was down here trying to create busing for the school district and another arm of the federal government was about to build a 300 unit public housing project that was only going to require more busing and it just made absolutely no sense.”
“We ended up suing the Housing Authority and George Romney who was then Secretary of Housing in Washington. The case was tried in the Federal District Court, went on for a week and we were successful. And it was never appealed. Neither the local housing authority nor the government appealed the case.”
They weren’t so successful with attempt to prevent Mopac from cutting Clarksville in half. Which is another story for another episode of PHIT substack.
Richard Croxdale