Serving bigots their just desserts

Jack Greenberg is a mainstay in the fight for equal rights. Picture / Kenny Rodger

The walk to school through New York's Brooklyn district in the late 1920s took young Jack Greenberg and his pals past a Chinese laundry. Throwing stones through the laundry windows made a great noise and it was fun - and, after all, the owners were Chinese, so they deserved it.

Greenberg had never heard the word "racism", but he had heard his Romanian-born mother and Polish father talking about the terrible things happening to Jewish families like theirs in Eastern Europe.

So as little Greenberg hurled the stones he had a sick, ashamed feeling that this was shockingly naughty.

"The other kids thought it was great fun and I can't think of any reason why, except that the people were Chinese," says 80-year-old Greenberg, one of the world's most widely admired civil rights lawyers. "I just had a sense that it was wrong."

His little-boy sense of injustice shaped the life of Jack Greenberg, law professor, anti-racism advocate, barrister for African-American activists including Martin Luther King and, to his enormous pride, cookbook author.

As New Line Cinema prepares to shoot a movie about his life, Greenberg is here at the invitation of the Legal Research Foundation and Auckland University Faculty of Law for lectures to the legal community and public.

His first and most famous big victory for black equality began when Greenberg was a 27-year-old lawyer, just out of university. He was one of the lawyers who successfully argued one of the most famous cases in American legal history - the United States Supreme Court's 1954 ruling that outlawed racial segregation in schools.

The decision launched the African-American civil rights movement and changed the US forever. Through the next two decades, black activists led a nationwide campaign of protest and civil disobedience which resulted not only in the desegregation of schools but in the gradual end of America's crippling official and societal racism.

It's easy to forget, says Greenberg, what the US was like before the 1954 ruling, which decided a series of cases known collectively as Brown v Board of Education.

Blacks endured daily humiliation - banned from entering "white" restaurants, forbidden to try on clothes in stores, made to use the servants' entrance.

"In New York City - which is not the South, remember - in many office buildings blacks had to use the freight elevator, the back elevator," Greenberg says.

"In Mississippi, a 14-year-old black boy named Emmett Till whistled at a white woman and was lynched," Greenberg remembers. "There was a television programme where the actor Harry Belafonte, who was black, put his arm around the shoulders of Dinah Shore, and there were headlines all over the United States that a black man had touched a white woman on television.

"I have a very clear picture in my mind of a few years ago being in Memphis in a restaurant where blacks would not have been admitted before the civil rights movement, and there was a black man and a white woman sitting at a table holding hands. Twenty years ago, he would have been murdered for that, no doubt about it."

In the Brown case, the Supreme Court declared that segregation was fundamentally unconstitutional, overturning six decades of legal precedent that separate black facilities were acceptable - as long as they were equal in quality to those provided for whites.

The case helped end the easy comfort of America's racist assumptions, Greenberg says.

"The Brown case was a catalyst for all sorts of societal change. It established a moral principle, put by the highest court in the land, on how we should govern ourselves."

The victory also plunged Greenberg into the struggle for civil rights.

He had come to law through the US Navy officer training programme, having fought the Japanese in the Pacific. After the Brown verdict, Greenberg ran the legal arm of one of America's key civil-rights groups, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, campaigning through the courts on issues that included equal employment, housing, voting rights, the death penalty and winning blacks the rights to eat in any restaurant, enter university, and sit anywhere they chose on a bus.

On leaving the NAACP in 1984 Greenberg became a professor of law at Columbia University and ever since has travelled the world teaching, lobbying on behalf of activist groups, including Human Rights Watch, spreading the civil rights message - and eating.

Greenberg adores food, to the extent that while dean of Columbia University's undergraduate college in 1991 he published a cookbook with his friend John Vorenberg, former dean of Harvard law school. They called it Dean Cuisine: The Liberated Man's Guide to Fine Cooking.

"There are recipes that we picked up in our travels, things we picked up in cookbooks. I make it up as I go along and I think it's about understanding the principles of cooking, how food reacts to treatment," he says.

In the corner of an office at Auckland University, Greenberg's wife, Debby, also an accomplished lawyer, is tapping out emails on a laptop, chuckling as her husband starts to enthuse about a meal in Jerusalem.

"We went to a restaurant where they had kumquat soup for dessert. It was a hot soup, with orange juice and lime and kumquats, and it had a chocolate fritter in it."

The professor beams. The best bit is coming.

"Well, I liked that, but for dessert I don't like anything hot, so I decided to make it cold, and instead of a chocolate fritter we put some chocolate sorbet in there. Beautiful."

Speaking of food, the Greenbergs shared a last supper of sorts this month with New York Times journalist Judith Miller, the night before she was jailed for refusing a grand jury's demand that she name the Government source who leaked the identity of a covert CIA agent to Miller and other reporters.

The source, who has been named by other journalists as White House chief political adviser Karl Rove, allegedly revealed the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame - possibly an attempt to ruin her career in revenge for criticism of the Iraq war by Plame's diplomat husband.

"I think what's happened to her is an outrage,"Greenberg says. "Of all the people involved in this thing, on all sides, she never wrote a story [naming Plame]. She never leaked the information. The criminal law works in such a way that others who have committed a grievous wrong are walking around scot-free and she's the one who is suffering, because of a principle which I admire."

Miller's case demonstrates the need for laws protecting the right of journalists to keep sources secret, Greenberg says. The principles which he has spent a lifetime defending are under attack in the US, where he says the Bush Administration is not friendly to human rights and civil rights.

"If you take race, for example, they are not cordial to school integration, they're opposed to affirmative action. They say women's rights should be promoted but they're opposed to the right to an abortion. And they have some kind of view of what constitutes torture that says it's not torture as long as it doesn't cause organ failure."

He laughs at the absurdity of that definition. "They should have gone into it more carefully. Which organ are they talking about? Some organs are more likely to fail than others."

Greenberg's career proves the power of courtroom argument, but he's depressed by President Bush's pattern of stacking the courts with conservative judges.

"I think political activity is more important now and legal activity is going to be less and less effective, except in extreme cases."

Greenberg has made his life an individual crusade against hatred with the firm belief that one person can make a difference.

With a lifetime's experience in challenging precedent, Greenberg the chef looks at a recipe and then makes it better - like the Sashimi Napoleon dish he discovered in an Hawaiian restaurant.

"You take wonton wrappers and make them crisp in the microwave, or fry them or roast them, then you place one crispy wrapper on a plate, then put some tuna on top, then another wonton wrapper, then keep making layers with some sole, then salmon, and you work together some caviar and mayonnaise and put that between the layers, and put some wasabi vinaigrette around it, then you break it all up and eat it with chopsticks.

"If you don't like any of that stuff you can make it with just anything, any fish you like. And if you get someone who doesn't like fish you can put some prosciutto in it. I don't follow the recipe slavishly at all."

JACK GREENBERG

Professor of law, Columbia University

BORN: New York, December 22, 1924

CAREER: Served in the US Navy during World War II as a lieutenant before studying law at Columbia. Worked for NAACP Legal Defence Fund from 1949 to 1984, including 23 years as director. Has taught law at Columbia and other universities for past 21 years. Dean of the undergraduate school Columbia College from 1989 to 1993.

MOST FAMOUS CASES:

* Brown v Board of Education (1954): Forced all-white schools to admit black children, ending 60 years of official segregation.

* Meredith v Fair (1962): Won black student James Meredith admission to the University of Mississippi, sparking Ku Klux Klan riots and forcing President John F. Kennedy to send in National Guard troops.

* Hamm v City of Rock Hill (1965): Overturned all convictions of activists who had joined sit-in protests at lunch counters.

* Coker v Georgia (1977): Outlawing of the death penalty in rape cases, releasing 17 black and three white defendants from death row.

* Jack Greenberg will deliver a public lecture at the University of Auckland on July 27 before addressing a Legal Research Foundation conference on August 5 and the New Zealand Bar Association conference in Queenstown on August 12.