Matthew Perry, 1921–2011

last updated 8 January 2015

A deep civility marked U.S. District Judge Matthew Perry’s lifelong fight for civil rights. As a young lawyer in the 1950s and ’60s, he made friends of his enemies, even as he compelled unwilling whites to open schools and parks to his fellow black South Carolinians. “He would co-opt the other side by being so decent and honest—and smart as hell too,” said Morris Rosen, who as an attorney for the city of Charleston frequently faced off against Perry. “He beat the hell out of me.”

Born in Columbia, S.C., to a tailor father and a seamstress mother, Perry awoke to the injustice of segregation during World War II. While home on leave from the army, “he was forced to order his lunch through a restaurant window while, inside, he could see Italian prisoners of war being served by waitresses,” said the Columbia State. “You have no idea the feeling of insult I experienced,” Perry later recalled. After the war, he studied law and, in 1951, set up practice as the only black attorney in Spartanburg, where he would often accept “home-baked pies as payment” from his poor clients, said The New York Times. In the mid-1950s, Perry started working with the NAACP, winning cases that desegregated South Carolina’s universities and forced the state to reapportion discriminatory legislative districts.