OMEGA CHAPTER
BY RICK BLALOCK
Julius L. Chambers broke barriers, fought discrimination [Gamma Beta, ‘56]
J
ulius L. Chambers lived segregation then defeated it. He will always be known as one of those unsung heroes who were the very underpinning of the Civil Rights Movement. Like Brother Martin Luther King Jr., and others, Julius L. Chambers, a civil rights attorney, endured firebombings of his house, office and car. The intimidation came with winning case after case against racial segregation. In the latter part of his career, Brother Chambers was president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in 1984. But long before that, he was in the trenches in the Deep South making changes, from the moment he graduated from law school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—which at the time begrudgingly began admitting “negroes.” In 1965, he worked with the NAACP and took on 35 school-desegregation suits and 20 suits charging discrimination in public accommodations. One of those cases (Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education) went all the way to the Supreme Court, and in 1971, justices unanimously upheld granting federal courts the power to order busing to force racial integration. The ruling had the effect of ending government-sanctioned segregation in Southern schools. Brother Chambers would also take on job discrimination cases in his long career. But, his victories came with a cost. After the Supreme Court’s decision, his offices were firebombed. In the wake of his string of court wins in 1965, his car was firebombed and two bombs exploded in his home. Born Julius LeVonne Chambers in 1936, in Mount Gilead, N.C., Chambers experienced segregation up close and personal. He began his education in a small racially segregated rural school that
lacked both indoor plumbing and a library. He then attended an all-black high school, to which he was bused 12 miles past a better equipped all-white high school less than a mile from his home. He graduated in May 1954, the month the Supreme Court ordered an end to school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. He then enrolled at historically-black North Carolina Central University, in Durham, N.C., where he was initiated into Alpha Phi Alpha at Gamma Beta Chapter in 1956. He was elected student body president and graduated summa cum laude. Next, he earned a master’s degree in history from the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He earned his law degree from UNC at which he was editor of The North Carolina Law Review. Despite graduating first in his class, he was barred from the year-end banquet at the segregated Chapel Hill Country Club. Brother Thurgood Marshall, who headed the legal defense fund at the time, tapped him to be an intern. By 1972, Chambers private practice in Charlotte grew to 11 members, five of whom were white. He had the first integrated law firm in North Carolina. After teaching at Michigan’s law school, he returned to his undergraduate alma mater in 1993, as president of North Carolina Central University. He went back to practicing law in 2001. Brother Chambers had a heart attack in April, and had been in declining health. His wife died in 2012, and he entered Omega Chapter Aug. 2, 2013, at his home in Charlotte, N.C. He was 76. He is survived by his son, daughter and three grandchildren. Horace G. Dawson Jr. [Nu, ‘46], former U.S. ambassador to Botswana, contributed to this story.
44 44 SPHINX THE SPHINX