Divided we Fail by Sarah Garland

Author:Sarah Garland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807001783
Publisher: Beacon Press

Chapter 18

The law offices of Teddy B. Gordon occupied a small, two-story brick building marooned among acres of parking lots and skyscrapers in downtown Louisville. The diminutive building was a remnant of earlier iterations of the city, when the street had been lined with retail stores and saloons, before business headed to the suburbs and wrecking balls transformed the streetscape. Somehow, the building had survived.

In the winter of 1998, the members of CEASE called Gordon, on a tip from a friend that he might be willing to take the Central case.1 Inside the building, a small reception area was nestled under a staircase leading to the second floor. Instead of law books, the shelves in his office held a collection of dozens of teddy bears in every shape and size, each one labeled with a child’s name. They were souvenirs from the many private adoption cases Gordon had handled over the course of his three-decade career.2 In addition to adoptions, he did no-contest divorces, personal injury cases, and workers’ compensation claims. In the early 1990s, he had made the local news for representing an overweight couple who injured themselves on a water slide at Louisville’s amusement park, Kentucky Kingdom.3

On a few occasions, however, his cases had veered into civil rights law. In the early 1990s, he represented a white police officer who said he had been discriminated against because several black officers were promoted before him.4 He also argued the case of a black police dispatcher who said his supervisor had used racial slurs.5 When CEASE first contacted him, he had been making headlines in a local election case. His client, an African American candidate for city alderman, sued her opponent for distributing chicken wings to poll workers on Election Day.6 Gordon won the case and got his client’s opponent removed from office, although voters reelected the man shortly after.7

A short man with a Kentucky twang, Gordon fit the stereotype of a small-town Southern lawyer, the last person one might expect to support an Afrocentric cause. His jowly face and expressive gray eyebrows called to mind the actor Charles Durning. He wore off-the-rack J. C. Penney suits and had a large American flag painted on the side of his office building. His style was folksy. He seemed like a conservative good old boy. But he wasn’t really.

Gordon had deep liberal roots. His parents were Latvian Jewish immigrants and he had been raised in the East End, Louisville’s left-leaning, upper-middle-class enclave. His father had fled the pogroms, and he related to his son the fate of several relatives left behind who had been murdered and hung from meat hooks. The family ran a grocery store in the West End, a few blocks southwest of Central High School. As a kid, Teddy commuted to the store after school and delivered groceries to the surrounding black neighborhoods.

His parents weren’t particularly political, but Teddy recalled them repeating adages such as “Don’t say anything so bad that you can’t go talk to the person again,” and instilling in him that their business depended on treating their black customers well.

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