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Richard Cohen ’76: Champion for Those in Need

By Carol Paik ’90L, ’05 Arts

Getting Richard Cohen ’76 on the phone might seem like a daunting task. This week — like most other weeks — he is swamped. For Cohen, “swamped” might mean that he is filing a lawsuit against United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement over dragnet raids conducted in southern Georgia, that he is meeting with filmmakers to discuss a documentary about Cesar Chavez’s ’60s strike and boycott, or that he is monitoring new evidence of neo-Nazi infiltration in the military. He also could be busy supervising the 100 or so employees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, of which he is president and CEO.

Richard Cohen

“We will help any group that doesn’t have a champion,” Richard Cohen ’76 says of the Southern Poverty Law Center, of which he is president and CEO.

Photo: PENNY WEAVER

But when reached on the telephone for an interview, Cohen is courteous and good-humored. “I’m a Southern gentleman,” he asserts mildly, hints of his native Virginia evident in his inflection. “I always return my phone calls.”

When the talk turns to personal matters, though, he grows reserved. Because of the center’s high-profile work against white supremacist groups, his caution is reasonable. More than two dozen people have gone to jail in connection with plots to blow up the facility in downtown Montgomery, Ala., or kill the center’s leaders. Both the building and Cohen’s home are guarded, and there have been times when he has had to leave his home and stay in a hotel as a precautionary measure. But Cohen is pragmatic about the threats. Although he admits that “those aren’t good weekends,” he insists that “in a day-to-day sense you don’t think about it a whole lot. Today, 24/7 security is an unfortunate fact of life.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center (www.splcenter.org) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1971 whose mission is to fight discrimination and defend society’s most defenseless members. The center’s work is supported by donations from individuals; it does not receive government funds. Its founders, Morris Dees and Joseph J. Lewin Jr., began by taking civil rights cases, on a pro bono basis, that few others would pursue. Early in the center’s history, regional racial issues dominated its agenda, but as Cohen says, “We also want to have a national impact.” The center has, for example, instigated a celebrated series of cases against hate groups from North Carolina to Idaho. It has won victories for women’s rights in the Supreme Court and has represented “brown lung” victims and advocated prisoners’ rights. “We will help any group that does not have a champion,” says Cohen.

Recently, the center has been focusing on the plight of migrant workers and immigrants of color. Cohen is generally soft-spoken and congenial, but when he speaks of the center’s work, his voice takes on a note of controlled urgency and his pronunciation becomes crisp. “The problem of recent immigrants of color is one of the foremost issues today,” he says. “We literally lure them into this country with the promise of jobs. We all enjoy the benefits of their labor. We exploit them, and then we vilify them.”

Cohen was born and raised in Richmond, Va. His father ran an interior decorating firm, his mother was a legal secretary and he describes his upbringing as “middle class.” But Cohen says he was always drawn to civil rights issues. “Growing up as a Jewish kid in Richmond in the ’60s, I had a real sense of being an outsider. I was told on many occasions that I was not going to be saved. I knew there were places my family couldn’t live and clubs to which we couldn’t belong.”

Cohen’s high school years were times of civil rights turmoil for Richmond. “The city was wracked by racial issues,” he remembers. When Richmond instituted crosstown busing in order to integrate public schools, his parents allowed him to make the decision whether to stay in the public school or to go to a private one. “I chose to stay,” says Cohen. “I was stunned that so many of my Jewish friends abandoned the school system. I believed that the entire community — particularly those of us in the Jewish community — had the collective responsibility to make it work.”

When it came time for college, Cohen says, “I wanted to go to the most exciting place I could think of, both intellectually and socially, and that was Columbia and New York City.” When he arrived in New York in the early ’70s, Morningside Heights still was reeling from the 1968 and 1970 demonstrations. Cohen recalls that at his 30th reunion, “People were talking about what a depressed state Columbia was in when we were in college, and I thought, ‘I was cheated!’” He laughs. “But as a kid walking around campus, I loved it.”

A philosophy major, Cohen believes he benefited from the mix of philosophy and economics classes he took. “One was about thinking high thoughts — at least, we thought they were high thoughts at the time — and the other about thinking practical thoughts,” he says. Cohen treasures the time he spent at Columbia. “It was a time of free thinking, when people were really encouraged to challenge assumptions. And I think that’s what I’m doing in my work now.”

At the same time, Cohen recalls that as a Southerner he often felt he had a different perspective from his fellow Columbians. “You had the accent, people looked at you like you were from another world,” he says. “I saw a lot of arrogance on the part of Northerners. They thought they were less prejudiced than people in the South, even though places like Boston and Yonkers were exploding with violence at the time.”

Cohen graduated from Virginia law school in 1979 and went on to practice law in Washington, D.C., with Charles Morgan, a prominent civil rights lawyer. In 1986, at the urging of Dees, whom he had met through colleagues, Cohen moved to Montgomery to become the center’s legal director. He was only 31. About two months later, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an important class action desegregation case that the center had brought against the Alabama Highway Patrol on behalf of African-American troopers. The Justice Department reversed a lower court order that required the Alabama Highway Patrol to promote one black trooper for every white trooper promoted, as an interim measure while fair promotion tests were being developed. The Justice Department argued that the promotion plan violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The center now needed to convince the Supreme Court that the lower court’s order should stand.

Although Cohen, at that time, had never argued a case on appeal, Dees asked him to handle the argument. “He more than repaid my confidence,” says Dees. The Supreme Court upheld the federal court order, 5–4.

It was Cohen’s first victory at the center, but far from his last. He went on to work on a number of lawsuits against white supremacist groups such as White Aryan Resistance and United Klans, including a case in which he won an $85,000 jury verdict against William Pierce, head of the neo-Nazi group The National Alliance, and another that won a $37.8 million judgment against Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1997, The American Lawyer named Cohen as one of “45 Young Lawyers Outside the Private Sector Whose Vision and Commitment Are Changing Lives,” and in 1999, he was a finalist for the National Trial Lawyer of the Year. According to Dees, Cohen is “a brilliant editor and a classy writer. He is a total package: well-rounded, well-spoken, and he’s forgotten more law than I ever learned.”

In 2003, Cohen became the center’s president and CEO, a job which, as Cohen puts it, “takes many forms.” Apart from his legal and administrative duties, he has served as executive producer for six short documentary films made as part of the center’s Teaching Tolerance program, which provides K–12 teachers with classroom materials to aid them in teaching tolerance and diversity. Cohen and his staff generate film ideas, hire the filmmakers, approve the scripts, look at the rough cuts and give intensive feedback. Two of the center’s films, A Time for Justice (1994) and Mighty Times: The Children’s March (2005), have won Academy Awards for Best Documentary, Short Subject. “Two years ago I was at the Oscars!” Cohen says with a chuckle, about the outing that taught him at least one thing: “Even a $40 rental tux looks good on television.”

Although Cohen admits he works long hours — “I don’t make a sharp distinction between my work and my leisure,” he says — on this day, as we converse, he takes a moment to count his blessings. “I’ve led a charmed life,” he says. “I’m aging gracefully. My hair is graying, but I still have it all. It’s 70 degrees, and I’m wearing short pants and tennis shoes.

“I don’t envy the suits.”


Carol Paik ’90L, ’05 Arts lives in New York. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Brain Child, Fourth Genre, The Gettysburg Review, Literary Mama and Tin House.

 

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