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.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
-
Today's political cartoons - May 1, 2024Cartoons Wednesday's cartoons - beware of governor, biting debates, and more
-
Democrats defang GOP speaker ouster threatSpeed Read Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said she will force a vote to remove House Speaker Mike Johnson
-
Biden poised to ease marijuana restrictionsSpeed Read The move will reclassify it as a less dangerous drug
-
Benjamin Zephaniah: trailblazing writer who 'took poetry everywhere'Why Everyone's Talking About Remembering the 'radical' wordsmith's 'wit and sense of mischief'
-
Shane MacGowan: the unruly former punk with a literary soulWhy Everyone's Talking About The Pogues frontman died aged 65
-
'Euphoria' star Angus Cloud dies at 25Speed Read
-
Legendary jazz and pop singer Tony Bennett dies at 96Speed Read
-
Martin Amis: literary wunderkind who ‘blazed like a rocket’feature Famed author, essayist and screenwriter died this week aged 73
-
Gordon Lightfoot, Canadian folk legend, is dead at 84Speed Read
-
Barry Humphries obituary: cerebral satirist who created Dame Edna Everagefeature Actor and comedian was best known as the monstrous Melbourne housewife and Sir Les Patterson
-
Mary Quant obituary: pioneering designer who created the 1960s lookfeature One of the most influential fashion designers of the 20th century remembered as the mother of the miniskirt
