In 1968 several attorneys from some of the District of Columbia’s leading law firms decided to respond to the racial disturbances plaguing the District and other cities around the country by creating an organization that would provide pro bono legal services to those battling discrimination and poverty.

Forty years later that organization, the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, continues that mission. Since its inception the committee has handled more than 5,000 civil rights cases in areas such as employment, housing, and public accommodations.

By mobilizing the resources of volunteer lawyers and law firms in the District, the committee has been able to provide more than 50,000 hours of legal representation annually for its clients.

Today the committee has a staff of 28, including 16 attorneys, and it also boasts a 50-member board of directors. Its work focuses on seven project areas: D.C. prisoners’ rights, disability rights, equal employment opportunity, fair housing, public accommodations, public education, and immigrant and refugee rights. In addition, the committee periodically works on ad hoc projects.

Roderic “Rod” Boggs has served as the committee’s director since 1971. Before becoming director, Boggs worked at the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights as a staff attorney and for the Ford Foundation in Tanzania. In 1969 and 1970 he served as the district representative for Congressman Allard K. Lowenstein of New York.

Washington Lawyer recently sat down with Boggs to discuss the history of the committee upon its 40th anniversary.

What would you say was the impetus behind the creation of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee?
The Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs was formed in late 1968 as a response to the civil disturbances that had erupted in cities across the country, beginning in the mid-1960s, and in the District, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April of 1968. More specifically, Judge Louis Oberdorfer, then chair of the National Lawyers’ Committee and a partner at Wilmer Cutler & Pickering, asked John Nolan of Steptoe & Johnson LLP to help in forming a local committee to address the legal issues identified by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission, as the root causes of the urban riots.

John and Lou reached out to a group of leading lawyers and law firms in the city for assistance. This group included John Douglas at Covington & Burling LLP, Jack Miller at Miller Cassidy, William Rogers at Arnold & Porter LLP, and Edward Bennett Williams at Williams & Connolly LLP. Nolan was named as the first committee chair.

In reaching out for help in starting the committee, Oberdorfer was fond of noting the civil rights laws that had recently been enacted would not amount to anything without lawyers to enforce them. He hoped the private bar in the District and its counterparts across the country would respond to this challenge.

Who was the committee’s first director, and how did you come to take over the position?
The committee’s first director was Paul Cohen, who served for a year or so before leaving to work for a legal services organization in California. He was succeeded by Jake Bleveans, who previously had been a staff attorney in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice. I was hired by Steve Pollak, the committee’s second chair, in April 1971. At that time, I was a staff attorney at the National Lawyers’ Committee, working primarily on issues of racial discrimination in the construction industry. Prior to joining the National Lawyers’ Committee staff in late 1969, I had worked on the staff of Allard Lowenstein, a congressman from New York.

Were there any challenges in taking on the director’s position at such a young organization?
Looking back, I suppose there were a lot of challenges, in part because the committee in 1971 had a relatively small docket, a two-lawyer staff, and limited contacts at many of the firms in the city. Soon after I arrived, it became clear what we needed was a catalyst to find clients and allow us to mobilize significant numbers of lawyers to address specific legal problems.

We were fortunate in those early days to develop three projects that met these criteria. One of them was in the area of criminal justice, where we found hundreds of criminal defendants addicted to heroin being routinely denied treatment for their addiction and faced with prosecution and lengthy incarceration. We began a special project led by Ann Macrory, and aided by Patricia Wald and Peter Hutt, to provide pro bono legal counsel for addicted individuals charged with simple possession of small amounts of drugs. Our goal was to raise a defense of addiction, similar to the insanity defense, to seek diversion of our clients into appropriate drug treatment programs.

Thanks to the help of more than 100 volunteer attorneys from dozens of area law firms, the program was highly successful in securing diversion and treatment for virtually all of our clients. Unfortunately, the legal challenge we brought to the underlying criminal charges was lost, by a single vote, in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. To me, the project showed there was a receptive audience in our legal community for pro bono work and criminal justice reform.

At about the same time, we began a project focused on racial discrimination in the D.C.-area construction industry. This came as the District was starting the construction of a new subway system. Together, with the Washington Urban League, we took a hard look at the employment records of construction unions and building contactors. We found African American workers were vastly underrepresented in virtually all skilled construction trades. Unions such as the sheet metal workers, for example, had barely a handful of black members.

In response to this problem, we worked with a task force of community and workers’ organizations to identify clients who wanted to gain admission to the skilled trades and reached out to area law firms for help in filing cases. As a result, we brought more than a dozen big cases involving some of the area’s largest and most discriminatory unions and contractors. With help from teams of lawyers at Arnold & Porter and Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, we also represented community groups in advocating the adoption by the United States Department of Labor of one of the first affirmative action plans in the country, covering a metropolitan construction industry.

In 1972, soon after the start of the construction industry initiative, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was amended to provide a private right of action to federal, state, and municipal workers challenging discrimination in employment. This new law served as the impetus for the committee to start what has become its largest program. We began an Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Intake Program directed primarily at federal government employees and initiated a strong effort to recruit lawyers at area firms to join in providing pro bono support. We found hundreds of lawyers across the city ready to help. The resulting cases included more than a dozen class actions tackling systemic denials of equal employment opportunity based on race and gender, and other cases that established important precedents governing procedural and substantive rights under the new law.

Many of the lawyers who volunteered on these early cases were young associates who have gone on to prominence and leadership at their firms and in the profession. Among that group of early volunteers were Dave Cynamon, Marc Fleischaker, John Payton, Roger Warin, and Tom Williamson Jr.

So, it wasn’t hard recruiting lawyers to work with the Lawyers’ Committee?
It wasn’t hard because we found many lawyers had a passion for civil rights, and there was a spirit at the time, which I believe has continued in Washington, to embrace public service as part of being a lawyer. A great many of the lawyers who worked with us early on came from firms whose founders had worked in the Roosevelt, Kennedy, or Johnson administrations and encouraged the idea of pro bono service.

It also helped to be getting started at a time when new civil rights laws were taking effect, and there were many compelling cases to be brought. I think we were fortunate to have created a broad outreach network of executive committee members drawn from more than 50 firms who were very helpful in recruiting volunteers and persuading their firms to offer financial support.

What were the committee’s next projects?
At the same time the committee was actively working on it first EEO cases and its Narcotics Treatment Project, it also was litigating its first prisoners’ rights cases. These cases included important challenges to the denial of medical services at Lorton Reformatory and an extended challenge to the denial of due process in prison disciplinary procedures.

In 1978 we responded to the reality there were no legal services agencies with Spanish speakers in the D.C. area providing representation to the growing immigrant population in our community. We began a new program, which has become our Immigrant Rights Project, to address this need. This program quickly expanded to provide help to hundreds of individual clients seeking political asylum or temporary permission to remain in the United States, in the face of dangerous conditions in their homelands. It remains a major part of our mission today.

During this period, we also realized there might be a special role the committee could play in supporting our city’s public schools. By the late 1970s, it had become clear in the years following court-ordered desegregation that our schools had deteriorated badly and resegregated along both racial and economic lines. I was introduced to the then-superintendent of schools, Vincent Reed, and he welcomed the idea of having law firms provide legal support to parents at local schools who wished to become more involved in budget, curriculum, and personnel decisions affecting their children. In 1980 the resulting effort saw the committee provide major support in the creation of Parents United for the D.C. Public Schools, an organization that led the fight for improved school funding and other educational reforms. It has had a significant impact in preventing budget cuts and arguing for smaller classes and new funding to restore crumbling school buildings. The committee’s education program has evolved to include the sponsorship of partnerships linking nearly 40 area law firms with individual D.C. public schools. These partnerships bring tutoring, mentoring, and other enrichment opportunities to thousands of children every year.

In the field of education reform, I think one of the things the committee is most proud of is the ultimate success produced by its major litigation, supported by a terrific team at Steptoe & Johnson, which challenged the city to abate more than 10,000 fire code violations at our schools. I believe this case contributed significantly to the eventual decision by the city to commit major capital funding to rebuild our schools. That being said, it is also true that perhaps the most frustrating single aspect of the committee’s work is that we have not made more progress in improving our schools so that they provide all of our children with a good education.

What has your relationship with D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee been like?
The committee’s board took a strong position in favor of providing Mayor Adrian M. Fenty with the authority to appoint the chancellor. It did so because the board saw a critical need to assure accountability in a system where finger-pointing was the norm, and progress was halting at best. We reached out to Michelle Rhee soon after her appointment and have found her to be very responsive to our offer of help. We are especially heartened by the recent appointment of Jim Sandman, former D.C. Bar president, as the school system’s general counsel, and we look forward to working with him and the chancellor in expanding our law firm partnership program and on many other joint ventures. At the same time, we plan to continue our longstanding role of advocacy on behalf of needed reforms.

What other committee projects have been created?
In 1980 the committee established its Fair Housing Project, and 10 years later we created a Disability Rights Project. Both of these projects work closely with one another and with our Equal Employment Opportunity Project. Our fair housing work, which began in the mid-1970s with a relatively small number of cases, grew significantly beginning in 1982 following the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Havens Realty Corp. v. Coleman, which upheld the standing of testers and fair housing organizations to pursue claims under federal civil rights statutes. Shortly after this decision, the committee assisted an interracial and interdenominational group of clergy in the creation of the Fair Housing Council of Greater Washington (FHC), an organization that has led the way in investigating and challenging a broad range of discriminatory housing practices.

Our Disability Rights Project was launched in 1991, shortly after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Much of the project’s work has been on behalf of the Disability Rights Council (DRC), an investigative and advocacy group founded by a group of area attorneys with disabilities led by Marc Fiedler, David Isbell, and David Tatel (before his appointment to the bench). In 1990 the committee also assisted a group of local attorneys and scholars in creating the Fair Employment Council of Greater Washington (FEC). This organization, initially chaired by Peter Edelman and Kim Keenan, has pioneered the use of paired testers to investigate allegations of discrimination in hiring.

Several years ago, the FHC, ERC, and DRC merged to become the Equal Rights Center. These organizations work together and are represented by the committee and volunteer counsel in a range of cases.

How has your relationship with area law firms progressed since you began?
It has grown significantly in breadth and depth as the committee has taken on new projects and increased its staff capability to develop new cases. With each new project, especially those not focused on litigation, we found a new group of firm volunteers who were ready to join in our work. This process was greatly aided by the decision in 1993 to seek an independent tax-exemption and self-regulating board. Until that time, we had operated technically as an autonomous part of the National Lawyers’ Committee. By establishing our own board of directors and a parallel set of trustees and firm representatives, giving us a strong presence in many new firms, we were able to reach far more lawyers who were interested in pro bono service. Today, we have a board of 50 members and representatives at more than 80 firms.

Have you seen a changing level of interest in pro bono work since the committee began?
I think the level has remained fairly steady. Although you hear some firms are becoming less committed to pro bono work, and that there is more pressure for billable hours, these factors have not appreciably affected the committee’s ability to find law firm volunteer support. In fact, the committee is probably providing more pro bono services than at any time in its history. I think this is partially because of the good fortune we have had in building strong relationships with many firms over the years, but it also may be related to the growing sense at many firms that a strong pro bono program is good for recruiting new lawyers and the efforts of the bar to emphasize the profession’s pro bono obligations. The D.C. Bar in particular has long been a leader in this regard.

Has the Lawyers’ Committee been involved in anything outside its established projects?
The committee has always stood ready to undertake special cases and ad hoc projects in response to needs in the community or requests from national civil rights organizations. The first such matter I remember goes back to the mid-1970s when we joined a federal government attorney, Allison Brown, in a case challenging the refusal of a local private school to admit black children. This case, Runyon v. McCrary, found its way to the Supreme Court. Our involvement in the Holiday Spas litigation, and later the Denny’s case, are examples of ad hoc litigation in the area of public accommodations, as is the extensive work we have done in recent years with the NAACP challenging the treatment of black bikers in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and a series of other cases involving national restaurant chains. Most recently, we have been active in litigation to challenge gun violence in the District.

On the ad hoc project side, for more than 20 years we have been sponsoring a special “Introduction to Legal Reasoning” course, under which minority students entering area law schools attend tutorial sessions taught by law firm volunteers. Greatly aided by administrative support from Hogan & Hartson LLP, this program has helped several thousand students and involved more than 1,000 law firm tutors. Over the years, the committee also has operated special programs focused on upgrading military discharges for minority veterans, representing migrant workers, and assisting day care providers in the inner city.

What type of cases are you seeing most often?
In the early days, we would see a very high percentage of race discrimination cases involving denials in hiring and promotion. Many of these cases developed into class action challenges. Today, race continues to be the largest single category of cases in our office, but we see many gender and national origin cases as well. Due in large part to our relationship with the Disability Rights Council, we also have a substantial number of disability access cases on our docket. Over the past couple of years, we have handled more than 20 cases challenging the refusal of landlords to accept housing choice vouchers, in violation of the D.C. Human Rights Act’s prohibition on source of income discrimination.

Tell me about the committee’s staff.
As has been true since we first began to build our projects, we have been fortunate to attract a truly excellent group of lawyers and support staff to work at the committee; they are a critical reason for our success. While in the early days the committee’s staff tended to be comprised primarily of younger lawyers, today our staff of 16 reflects a mix of attorneys at various levels, drawn from a variety of backgrounds.

For example, Susan Huhta, the director of our EEO Project, came to the committee after four years at Arnold & Porter, and our Fair Housing Project director, Isabelle Thabault, joined us after a 25-year career at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Elaine Gardner, who directs our Disability Rights Project, spent the earlier part of her career working at the National Center for Law and Deafness at Gallaudet University, and Laura Varela, who runs our Immigrant Rights Project, worked for Casa of Maryland for several years before coming on board.

Our Public Education Projects are led by two lawyers with long experience in dealing with our local schools. Mary Levy, who directs our Public Education Reform Project, previously had been a partner at Joseph Rauh’s firm, and Iris Toyer, who heads our D.C. Public School Partnership Program, had been a local Parent Teacher Association president and school board member before joining our staff. Phil Fornaci, who heads the Prisoners’ Rights Project, has a long history of legal services work in several respected organizations.

These project directors are supported by some excellent senior lawyers who joined our staff after distinguished careers in private practice or government. I cannot overstate the value of these senior lawyers to our programs. They provide a major source of support for our project directors and play a key role in the supervision of many important cases.

The last project the committee took on is the D.C. Prisoners’ Project. How did that come about?
About two years ago we were approached by the Prisoners’ Project with the idea of merging our programs. This was an immediately appealing idea for several reasons. First, because that program’s mission of providing legal help to the city’s prison population related closely to the Lawyers’ Committee’s basic purpose—in fact, work in this precise area had been a significant part of our earliest programs. Second, the Prison Project had a fine reputation and an excellent staff, which we immediately saw would work very compatibly with our own. After some discussion, the boards of both programs agreed that a merger would make a great deal of sense. I am delighted to say this was a great decision. Phil Fornaci and his staff have been terrific additions to the committee, and it has been a pleasure to work with them in the placement of important new cases.

Tell me about the lawsuit the committee and Covington & Burling filed last summer against the private prison corporation Geo Group and the Federal Bureau of Prisons for providing inadequate medical care at the Rivers Correctional Institution in North Carolina.
Nearly 1,000 D.C. inmates are incarcerated in the Rivers facility, which is located several hundred miles from here. It is privately operated, unlike Lorton Reform-atory, the local prison to which D.C. inmates routinely were sent until it was closed seven years ago. Unfortunately, we found the medical care at Rivers was deplorable in virtually every respect. We concluded litigation was appropriate, and we are very pleased Covington & Burling, which was among the first firms to work with the committee on prison litigation 30 years ago, was willing to put an excellent team to work on this case with us.

What are some of the other big cases you’re working on?
There are ongoing big cases with all of our projects. One of the largest is the disability case that Wiley Rein LLP brought with us several years ago involving the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority and its failure to provide legally mandated paratransit services to people with disabilities. This is a service Metro has operated under contract with several contractors for years, with horrible results. We began litigating a case challenging these conditions several years ago and recently reached a class-wide settlement affecting 17,000 paratransit users. It is one of the most significant settlements of its kind in the country.

Similarly, we are in the middle of litigating a number of major cases involving the failure of apartment builders and owners to comply with the accessibility requirements of the 1988 Fair Housing Amendments Act. These cases affect tens of thousands of housing units throughout the country.

How much difference do you feel the committee has made in addressing civil rights abuses?
We have good reason to believe the committee’s work has contributed significantly to improving the lives of many of our clients and curtailing many violations of our civil rights laws. So on this side of the ledger, there is much to be thankful for. On the other hand, when you look at the docket of cases we are pursuing and the number of requests we regularly receive from prospective clients, it is obvious there is still an extraordinary amount of work to be done. This is due in part to the intransigent nature of many of the problems we confront and the emergence of new issues and new constituencies in need of legal services. In this sense, the committee’s job is the same as it was 40 years ago—we try to find areas where the protections of our laws on paper haven’t been realized in fact, and we try to find the lawyers to make a difference.

Is the committee looking into any new issues or considering adding another project?
Every summer we have a dozen or so law students working in our office, and I always ask them the same questions: “What do you think the Lawyers’ Committee should be doing beyond the work now underway? What issues do you think are important?” Many of them say we should expand our focus on public education because they recognize that without good schools for all, progress in many other areas is limited. At the moment we are considering expanding efforts on behalf of day laborers denied legally earned wages and benefits, and challenges to predatory lending practices.

From the perspective of the staff, I think it is important the committee maintains its capacity to respond to emerging issues and new constituencies, some of which we might not be able to predict. This, I believe, has been one of our strengths and one that the board has long embraced.