First Interview of Frederick Cooke's Oral History by Bart Kempf, Esq.

ORAL HISTORY OF FREDERICK DOUGLAS COOKE JR. First Interview
May 21, 2007

This interview is being conducted on behalf of the Oral History Project of the District of Columbia Circuit. The interviewee is Frederick Douglas Cooke Jr. and the interviewer Bart Kempf. The interview took place on May 21, 2007.

TAPE #1

Mr. Kempf:

Mr. Cooke:

Mr. Kempf:

Mr. Cooke:

Today is Monday, May 21st, 2007, this is an oral history with Frederick Douglas Cooke, Jr. We are at 1155 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, DC at the law offices of Rubin, Winston, Diercks, Harris and Cooke, LLP. Fred, would you please state your full name, date, and place of birth.

Sure. My name is Frederick Douglas Cooke, Jr. I was born on May 26th, 1947 in the District of Columbia.
If you could start talking a little bit about your background. It might be good to start with maybe your grandparents, great grandparents and some of your ancestors, and tell us what you know about them.

Sure. I really don’t know much about my great grandparents on either my mother or my father’s side. I know my mother and father were both from the same small town in North Carolina called Franklinton, North Carolina, which is curiously enough also the home of Soupy Sales the former TV personality and comedian. But, in any event, they’re from this little town called Franklinton, NC.

I remember when I was a kid the population must have been about 1400 or something like that. My mother’s family was basically the Ellis and Bell family. Her father’s name was Hayward and her mother’s name was Hattie. They lived in this town and were farmers. They had 11 children, 7 daughters and 4 sons. My

mother was the youngest of the daughters and her name was Annie Leon (for reasons nobody could ever explain and she couldn’t either). But, they were farmer people and lived in rural, segregated NC. My dad’s family was also from that same little town or outside of it — wasn’t much of a town so it was hard to know if you were inside or outside of it. My father’s family were Cookes and Perrys. My dad’s father’s name was Herbert and his wife, my grandmother’s name was Elnore, not Eleanor but Elnore. My dad was one of 5 children. He had 3 brothers and a sister. They all lived there and they were farmers too. Neither my dad nor my mother ever actually finished high school. They went to school in the segregated South, worked on the farms. My dad was born in 1923. My dad, by the time World War II came along, got drafted before he finished high school and actually never afterwards finished high school. My dad, by all accounts, and his father were crazy hard-working guys, did all kinds of jobs as a youth and my grandfather as an adult and older guy. He had all kinds of odd jobs and other jobs to make money to support themselves. My dad, who was the oldest of his brothers and sisters, had the reputation of being sort of a mirror image of his father and he just worked all these jobs and worked all these places, he was a real hustler. When he went into the Army, he was in the Army for almost 4 years and when he was discharged he was discharged here in Washington DC for a reason that he never fully explained to me. But, he told me that he didn’t want to go back to NC and work on a farm is what it really came down to. He didn’t really want to do that and he had been here on the way to Europe and he decided he wanted to come here and work. There were jobs he thought he could get here.

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Do you know what his first job was here. Or, some of the things he did early on? Well, some of the things he did early on when he first came here, he worked. My dad had been a shoe repairman in the Army. It was weird. He was with the Quartermaster Corps. And, he repaired shoes. He got a job here repairing shoes when he got out of the Army. But, then he got a job pretty quickly after that working for the Navy Department in their mailroom as a mail clerk. And, he had that job for 40 odd years. That was really how he supported himself and his family. My mom came here after he got out of the Army.

Did she stay in NC during the War?
She stayed in NC during the War. They weren’t married but they were boyfriend/girlfriend, I guess.
Do you have any of their letters?
No. I have pictures of them when they were young people, early 20’s. But, I don’t have any letters. My dad actually finished the 10th or 11th grade, my mom left school before that in the 8th or 9th grade and that was mostly because they had to work and the fact that the schools weren’t very significant. Some of her brothers and sisters finished high school but she happened not to. My grandfather died when I was very, very young. All I really remember is his funeral. My grandmother lived a little bit longer and I also remember her funeral. I remember interacting with her as a kind of grandmother person. I don’t remember interacting at all with my mother’s father. I think I was like 3 when he died. I just don’t remember much about him except for the funeral thing. But, my grandmother was around when I was 7, 8, 9, 10 years old or something like that or

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until then rather. And, I remember my father’s mother and father lived a lot longer and I remember going to visit them in NC. They eventually moved to the District and lived here and so I would visit them when they lived her. Then they moved back to NC after my grandfather decided he didn’t like being here. He had been here for 10-12 years and decided he didn’t like it and went back to NC. He and my grandmother both actually died when I was in high school.
Did your parents ever speak of segregation in rural NC and talk about what that was like?
Oh yeah.
And, can you talk about that a little bit?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They hated that. It was a pretty direct and pretty inhospitable sort of segregation there. My parents’ families had been there for a long time.
Do you know if they were slaves there?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It is really cool in the sense that if you go to the White cemetery in Louisburg which is the next town to Franklinton you’ll see all these tombstones with Cooke on them. These are all White people who are not my relatives in a classic sense or direct sense but they are in a broader biological sense because they are the slave owners who owned relatives of mine who are named Cooke. My dad especially, that was one of the reasons he didn’t want to go back. The farming and just the segregation it was just horrible. I remember going there as a kid and this is in the 50’s when I was a kid. And, I had lots of cousins there because 3 of my mother’s brothers, well her brother and 2 of her sisters still lived there. So we would go visit my grandmother. As a kid I

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remember my cousins making real clear to me, “You can’t go here or you can’t go there.” I remember sitting in the balcony of the movie downtown because Black people had to sit up there.
Can you estimate the year?

This is in, sometime between ’54 to about ’56.
And you were going up to the theater?
Oh yeah. Going upstairs and we couldn’t go into the front door of a store. We had to walk past the cemetery and it was really kind of weird because I hated going through the cemetery but it was just the way to go. And, you walked through the cemetery to go to the store to buy penny candy and stuff like that. But, we couldn’t go in the front door, we had to go in the side door. Black people could not go in the front. We had to go in the side door. When they integrated the high schools, the schools there ultimately, this is long after 1954, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in my uncle’s front yard because his house was across the street from the former Black school. His kids were integrating the formerly White school. They burned a cross in his yard. It was really, there was really some very ugly stuff there. It was really weird. I remember driving with my dad to North Carolina to visit relatives. My dad was always very uncomfortable about that because we had to drive through Virginia and we had to drive through North Carolina. He was always concerned that somehow he would get stopped with these out-of-state plates that he had on his car and harassed or we would all be harassed. He was always very concerned about that. This was the only time I ever saw my father with a gun was when we would go on those trips to North

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Carolina. He would take a gun, I don’t know where he got it from. I never saw it before maybe it was a rent-a-gun, I don’t know.
(Laughter)…unintelligible.
Yeah, he would take this gun with him on these trips. My mother was always telling us to be very quiet and not to throw stuff out the window and just whatever. Just be good kids and sit in the back of the car and keep quiet, and play with each other, talk to each other or read a book or something like that. We had to get this trip done. This was before I-95 was fully built so when you were going down there you had to go on US Route 1 so you were going through a lot of small towns on the way to North Carolina. Lord knows what could happen when you hit the wrong town and the wrong cop in the wrong town or whatever. It would just be ugly. So it was a long trip. It took about 6 hours, 7 hours because you had to slow down when you went through these towns. So we would go on these trips and we thought it was fun you know the kids. We thought it was fun, we’d all be in the back laughing and having a good time. Reading signs and looking at license plates on cars and just stuff that you could see. I remember we would ask sometimes if we could stop and see this place. But my parents said “Nope, no stopping.” We would keep on trucking. So, my cousins and my other relatives, aunts and uncles in North Carolina had stories. My dad was really unhappy about that, but the interesting thing was that my dad when I got to be a college student and a law student too for that matter and was involved in some of civil rights demonstrations, he was always admonishing me that I need “to be careful and that I shouldn’t be doing this, it was dangerous.” As much as he didn’t like it, he was

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I think the parental thing about me being in jeopardy just got in the way. He couldn’t see it the way I did at the time…
He was concerned.
Yeah, he was concerned and I remember one time we had this big argument. It was interesting because we hardly ever had arguments about topical stuff. My dad wasn’t that kind of guy. My dad was a very, very traditional Southern guy — very few words. His deal is “I told you to do it, I don’t need to say it again and you don’t have anything to say because you just do what I told you to do.” It wasn’t hostile it was just that’s just the way it was. He would leave notes for us to do things around the house. It was just crazy. He would leave these notes and he would come home and would say, “The note, the note I told you to do so and so.” And, it was like “I got stuff to do, Dad.” But he didn’t see it that way. But any way, when we had this big argument because I was explaining to him how racism was a horrible thing and we needed to rise up. He went through this long explanation about how all White people weren’t bad and White people had helped him do this that and the other and I should be mindful of that. While he and I did not agree at that time, I knew he was a guy who was very intelligent. This was a guy who wanted very much in his life to be an engineer. I believe he certainly had the smarts to become an engineer in terms of his innate ability and what he had learned through his life about how to do things. He helped me build radios and things like that when I was interested in that [unintelligible, not sure of statements here – tape 1A @ 857]. And he knew all about this stuff. He was a ham radio operator. He knew all this stuff about electronics and he really wanted

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to be an engineer. But, the time in which he was born, the circumstances in which he was born didn’t really allow that to happen. Then family demands and he just couldn’t do that. He wanted very much for me to be an engineer. So much so in fact that that’s why I became an engineer or at least wanted to be an engineer. It was because I was trying to live his dream. This is all retrospective psychological analysis. I wanted to live his dream. He was as clear to me about that as a thing he wanted to do, but he had not been able to do it. I went to (I don’t know how it happened), I got to go to McKinley Technical High School here in the city. Where is that located?

It’s in NE, First and T Streets NE. And, I grew up in DC in NW near Georgia and New Hampshire Avenues, actually on Quincy Street. The schools here, you went to schools in zones based on where you lived.
Uhm hmm.

I lived very far away from McKinley so would have never gone there. For some reason, I was part of the whole baby boom, the schools had to figure out what to do with all these kids. There was this huge bump of kids that they had to figure out what to do with. I went to Banneker Junior High School and when I finished the 8th grade, the idea was that they were going to take all these soon to be 9th grade kids and put them in high school buildings because they didn’t have room for them physically in junior high school buildings. There were even more behind us too and there just was not enough space. We were sort of the leading edge in this, and so they pushed all the 9th graders for the first time in the city’s history into high school. [End Side 1, Tape 1] So when it was my turn to go to 9th grade

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I thought that I was going to go with most of my 8th grade classmates to Cardozo High school which was the high school that Banneker fed into.
Where is that?
Cardozo is at 13th and Clifton Streets.

Is that still, that school still around?
Oh yeah. They’re both still around. Now, actually the school I lived physically closer to was Roosevelt High School. Which was at 13th & Allison Streets, NW or 13th & Upshur Streets. It was really weird. I got a letter in the mail one day that said that I was assigned to McKinley High School — totally out of the blue, didn’t ask for it, didn’t want to go there – the public school system said, “That’s where you’re going kid.” So it was just what you did in those days you just saluted and went. I show up at McKinley in the 9th grade and they are explaining to us how wonderful McKinley is and all this kind of good stuff and we’re like yeah, yeah we’re in 9th grade we don’t care. They tell to us that McKinley had 3 concentrations. One was kind of music/art concentration, if you had musical ability. One was a kind of biological sciences and the other was engineering and physics. I decided I would do engineering and physics because my dad had been interested in that. [Unintelligible, Tape 1B @025]. So I got into this engineering and physics program with the expectation that I would go to college, get into some engineering school, and be an engineer. My dad-proud of me, or happy about what I was doing. I sort of enjoyed it. I was relatively good in math on the quantitative side. I applied when I was in high school to 2 schools to go to college. I applied to Howard University here in town because it was local, and I

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applied to the University of Southern Illinois in Carbondale Illinois which I had no idea where it was, or what it was. Somebody, I don’t think it was an adviser because an adviser at school told me that I needed to work with my hands, or and that I should not go to college because I was not college material.

So you this was your guidance counselor? Yeah.
Really?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(interrupting) So do you mind if I ask you a question?
Sure.
Do you remember the process that led you to not follow that advice? Or did you just always know that you were going to go to college? Was that something that your parents expected?
My dad certainly expected it. My mom was my mom. My mom was a wonderful, wonderful woman and loved her children, and anything we wanted to do she was happy with it. Going to college was great, but she did not see it as an imperative. She said, “You ought to do whatever makes you happy.”
She was gonna love you anyway.
Yeah, she was gonna love you. But my dad knew that college was the way to have a better set of circumstances income wise, and he was always encouraging me to think about college as something to do. We didn’t know how we were going to afford it, but the idea was I was going to go. So this woman, this adviser/counselor whatever you call it, said I should consider something manual.

I really hadn’t thought of it because I was in a school were most of the kids were thinking about college. It was just sort of an unannounced premise that this is what we were all going to do. We would finish high school and we were going to go to college. At least, most people I hung out with. Again – and you may not know this-, in the District in those days the students were arranged in the track system. There were 4 tracks. There was Track 1 which was college with honors, Track 2 which was college prep, Track 3 which was business, and Track 4 which they called the “basic track.” It was like manual and stuff — printing, auto mechanics. So, I was in Track 2 (mostly because I refused to be in Track 1, but that is another story) so the people that I hung out with my, my classmates were thinking about going to college. We were on college prep track and that was what the thing was. So, this teacher told me that I really should do something different. I just didn’t, you know we were rebellious anyway so what she said it was like, “Okay fine, that’s what you think, I’m going to college.” So, I somehow, it wasn’t her, somebody said I should apply to Southern Illinois. I didn’t know anything about Southern Illinois, had never heard of it, had never been to Illinois, didn’t know anybody who went there — just applied out of the blue. To go to Southern Illinois you had to take, not the SAT in those days, but the ACT. So I took the ACT and never took the SAT, took the ACT because that’s what you had to do to go to Southern Illinois, and I got accepted at Southern Illinois to be in the engineering program. And, they gave me a scholarship to come there. It was like really great. Now in retrospect, I think this was a part of getting more Black people to come out there but that was okay. So I say to my mom, “Hey I’m going

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to college and I’m going to Southern Illinois.” And she said, “No you’re not.” I says, “What do you mean? I got a scholarship.” She says, “It’s too far away, you can’t go there.” In a relative sense, almost an absolute sense, I was the first person in my family to graduate from high school let alone go to college. I had never been anywhere. Literally, the only place I had been in my life at that point when I was like a senior in high school was to North Carolina — D.C. to North Carolina. I had not been to New York City, I had never been to Philadelphia. I had driven to Baltimore because I wasn’t supposed to. When we got driver’s licenses we would drive to Baltimore to kind of be in another city. But, the only other place I had ever been was Baltimore or North Carolina. I had never been anyplace. I didn’t know anything. My mom was very, very protective. I was the oldest and it was “No you can’t go.” So, I was like bummed out, but I had applied to Howard and got accepted to Howard. So, she said, “You can go to Howard because you can stay at home” and I was like, “I don’t want to stay at home.” My dad was like not having that argument, “You got into college and Howard’s a good school, go.” So I went to Howard, and I remember how much drama there was with figuring out how to pay for college. Now, I was going to live at home so it wasn’t room and board but the tuition was $150.00 per semester. This was back in 1965. But they were like, “Whoa, how are we gonna make this $150.00 work?”

I wanna stop you for a second and ask you for a couple of facts if I could for the

Sure, sure.

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So, you graduated from high school in what year? 1965
And, it was McKinley high school?
McKinley Technical High School.

And, if I can ask before we move on to the college, I would like to ask you a couple more questions about McKinley.
Sure.
Do you know when McKinley was integrated?

McKinley was integrated in September 1954 like most of the schools in DC after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Although in D.C. the decision was called Bolling v. Sharpe because we came under federal laws as opposed to the 14th Amendment, we were 5th Amendment. But yeah, in the school year beginning 1954, September.

(interrupting) So this was September?
Yes, September 1954 was when McKinley was integrated and by the time I got to McKinley which was in the fall of 1961, I guess, there were almost no White people there.
Really?
It had been an all-White school, and in 6 years there were almost no White people there. It was unbelievable.
Do you know approximately what percentage African-American the school was when you finished?
Oh yeah, like 98 percent.

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98?
Yes, or maybe 99 percent. There were like 3, 4, or 5 White people in the whole school. It was fine, and we got along with them. They were such a huge minority that nobody bothered them. They were good folks. At least, we thought they were. Some were on the football team and other stuff. They participated or not as they chose to. But, it was an amazing transformation. My parents were sort of blockbusters. We lived in Northeast Washington for a number of years. I sort of remember living on Ames Street but not much.
What was the name?
Ames Street…A-M-E-S. Northeast, I forget the hundred block.
Sorry to interrupt you. Do you know where you lived when you were born? Was it Northeast?
No. We lived in Northwest, and my parents lived down on 14th and Church Street NW. That’s where we lived when I was born. And, then we moved to Northeast. They lived on Ames Street for a while. They were blockbusters.
They bought a house on Quincy Street, 917 Quincy Street was the house where I spent most of my growing up and I was really young — I think 4 or 5 years old. How many of you grew up in there?
All my brothers and sisters. I have two brothers and two sisters, all younger. Could you state their names please?
Sure. Deborah is the next oldest and my brother Calvin. Then my sister Renee or Vanessa and then my youngest brother Billy (William). Billy is adopted. My parents adopted Billy after his parents abandoned him, but that’s another crazy

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story. And, I had another brother named Gordon who died as an infant sort of between my brother Calvin and my sister Vanessa. He was an infant and died, but I don’t have recollection of him because he died when he was like about three weeks old. And, so, they moved to this neighborhood that had been predominantly White. It was transitioned, but it had been predominantly White. Do you know what year approximately?

Approximately ’53 or something like that, maybe ’52. The school that was in that neighborhood was a school called Raymond. I remember that you could see Raymond Elementary School from my front porch. It really was a playground, Raymond Recreation Center and then on the other side of the playground was the school. It was like a recreation center, the Department of Recreation playground called Raymond. Then there was the school playground and the school building and you could see it from my house. It was a long block, but you could see it. But, I couldn’t go there because that’s where White kids went and I couldn’t go there. So, I had to go to a school called Bruce on Sherman Avenue which was a walk. You couldn’t see it from my house, it was a walk (about a 10-15 minute walk). I remember that I didn’t for some reason go to kindergarten, I went to first grade. My younger sister Deborah who was a year younger than I was went to kindergarten. I remember my mom walking us to school every day and picking us up every day from school. It was a little bit too far for six year olds to walk unaccompanied and cross streets. I remember doing that and I remember that Bruce School had a coal-fired furnace. It had a big coal pit where people dropped coal off to put into the furnace to heat the building. We would just play in the

coal pit and get so filthy. I remember getting punished more than once for not listening to my mother’s admonition not to play in the coal pit. (Laughter) Why not, it was coal pit. It was a little hill full of coal, how would a kid not climb up on that. I got in big trouble. And, then, the very next year (this was my first grade year) I went to what used to be called Division II School. I went to Bruce. The very next year, unbeknownst to me, this Brown thing was happening and my parents told me I was going to go to Raymond. I went to Raymond as a 2nd grader. There were lots and lots of White kids there that year. And, the next year, very few White kids. By the time I graduated from Raymond in the 6th grade there were no White kids in the school at all (laughing). Unbelievable. It was just like none! So, I remember all that kind of stuff of how this racial transition happened in the city. In a lot of ways it was just amazing. I don’t remember sitting upstairs in the balconies in movies here in the city. I do in North Carolina. What I do remember is going to movies on U Street as opposed to any place in the city. U Street is where there was sort of like the Black downtown, if you will. I remember going to the movies on U Street and then I remember that my mother would let me go to the movies by myself as I got older — about 12 or 13, teenager-like. I remember going to lots of movies all over the city wherever I wanted to go. My brother and I or friends and I would go. There was one in the neighborhood that we used to not be able to go to that we could suddenly go to. I remember doing that and going to baseball games. Getting on the streetcar. The electric [streetcar] would drive from my neighborhood all the way down to Griffith Stadium which no longer exists and is now where Howard University ’s

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hospital is on that site — drive down to Georgia and Florida Avenue and go to baseball games. I remember when Willie Tasby was the first Black baseball player to play for the Washington Senators [actually it was Carlos Paula]. And I remember my dad and me going to see Willie Tasby play centerfield for the Senators when I was a kid.

How did you feel?
My dad was a big baseball fan. Which is part of the reason why I became a baseball fan. I really, really liked baseball, still do. In fact, my third daughter is named Rachel in honor of Jackie Robinson’s wife Rachel Robinson. Basically, I just liked baseball. I used to go down there [Griffith Stadium] and I could go by myself because I could just get on the trolley and drive down and go to the game and get back on the trolley and come back. There was not a lot of confusion about it. I could do that and I could negotiate that pretty much by myself. My parents would let me do that as long as I didn’t stay too long or get in any trouble. So, some buddies of mine and myself, my brother not so much. He was, my brother is three years younger than I am and I guess at the time that I was really into baseball he really wasn’t. He was too little of a brother and I didn’t want to do that. I would “you can’t go, you can’t keep up with us.” So he didn’t go. (Laughs) I have an older brother I know what that’s like.
Yeah, so I went with guys who were my age contemporaries. And, actually as it turns out, I was almost always hanging out with guys older than I was. I was the youngest one of my little group of friends, almost always. They were always… [Tape ends here]

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TAPE #2

Mr. Cooke:

I was talking about my neighborhood and how it evolved over time and how the racial aspect of the city changed, that I was a little bit aware of, not a whole lot. It wasn’t something my parents spent a lot of time talking about. It was that they would just tell you to do stuff, or not do stuff and not really explain why. I think they were probably protecting us, at least they thought they were, from a lot of discourse about unpleasant things (at least unpleasant in their minds). So, we moved there and I went to

(interrupting) there is Quincy Street?
Yes. “There” was Quincy Street and then I went to Raymond Elementary School and went there for 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th grade. Although, actually I was in the 6th grade twice because they figured out that I was sort of okay school wise and, when I was in the 5th grade, they put me in the 6th grade. That was fine, but then when I finished the 6th grade the first time they said I couldn’t go to junior high school because I was too young. And, they made me do the 6th grade again which, of course, was no fun (laughing). But, I had a great teacher who, a woman named Ms. Teague, who strangely enough was the niece of my next door neighbor. She didn’t live in the neighborhood or anything, but I came to find out that she was his niece. She was very helpful to me because she was the first teacher I had who told me I could be anything I wanted to be if I was willing to work at it. It wasn’t that other people necessarily discouraged me. She just sort of said, “You can do this, you can do anything you want to do if you are willing to work hard at it. You’re smart enough.” She was very, very helpful to me. And,

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in fact, it’s interesting that when I many years later (I really lost track of her, and I didn’t see her for a lot of years even though she was related to my next door neighbor), when I got to be the Corporation Counsel of the city she wrote me, sent me a little note. It said ‘Congratulations.” That was just amazingly heartwarming, and I wrote her back because at that point she had become a principal of an elementary school in Northwest Washington, H. D. Cooke (another ironic thing). She had become principal there and I sent her a little note and told her that I was really glad that she had sent her note and I carried what she said to me all this time. She had really been an influence. But anyway, she was very helpful to me. So I finished Raymond and I went to Banneker Junior High School which was about a mile from the house. A lot of time I would walk to school with my friends. At Banneker, because I had done the 6th grade twice and had done okay, they wanted to put me in the Honors Track. And, I didn’t want to be in the Honors Track because I said [to myself] there were too many girls and you know it just wasn’t, guys just didn’t do that. So, I resisted and then I became a behavior, deportment problem. So they didn’t put me in the Honors Track because I was a problem child. (Laughter) Which really annoyed my mother and father. I figured out a way to get myself suspended from school. So, once I did that they said you can’t be in the Honors Track because these are people who not only are academically performing they are also performing as responsible citizens. And, I said “Okay.” I wound up in the college prep track which was fine. That had more boys in that group and we just had more fun. I tell my children that from the time that I was in the 7th grade until I graduated from high

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school (5 or 6 years, 6 calendar years), I was suspended from school at least once a year every year. It was just bizarre. I don’t know how I managed to do that and still graduate (Laughter).
Schools were probably a lot stricter back then.

They were a lot stricter. But I really didn’t do anything really awful. I was just mischievous stuff. Just stuff done out of boredom that would cause me to think “Why can’t we do this?” And they would say, “Oh no, you have to go sit down.” Although one time I got suspended when I was at McKinley. I was in the 9th grade and I got suspended for about a week. I got suspended, but it was an in school suspension. I still had to go to school. I had to sit with the 9th grade principal who also was the algebra teacher. I had to take algebra three times a day (with the assistant principal for the 9th grade). [I was suspended] because I was in my homeroom with my homeroom teacher who happened to be White, she was a racist. I don’t know why she wanted to teach in a school system that was becoming, if not already at that point, overwhelmingly Black, but she did. My homeroom had been noisy a couple of days before and I think she was right about that. That wasn’t racist. She was right. She made us all write 500 times, “I will not talk in homeroom” or some such foolishness. My best friend at the time was a guy named Henry Thomas. Henry and I were just bad news together because we were always promoting each other to do something that was really outside the box. Henry and I decided we were not going to write 500 times “I will not talk in homeroom.” Because we would talk when we wanted to, saying that we would not talk would be a lie and we couldn’t tell a lie. So that was sort of our rationale.

She had long ago separated Henry and me, and literally made us sit at opposite ends on the front row of the homeroom, Henry at one end near the door and me at the end closest to her desk. So that she could see us when we were doing stuff if we sat in the front row. The usual pass’em up, pass’em over thing. So people were doing this and Henry and I had not done it. She’s asking me because I am sitting fairly close to her, “Where is paper?’ because I am not pulling anything out of my notebook. I said to her, “Ooh I didn’t do it and I didn’t feel like it.” She began admonishing me that I should do what I was told, and that I was going to get in trouble, she was going to send me to the principal. Well, I had been there before so no big deal. When all the papers from the other kids get to me I sort of lean over my desk to hand them to her. She is jabbering at me about not doing my assignment, and she sort of snatches the papers and they fall on the floor. She says that I threw them on the floor. I said, “I didn’t throw them on the floor. You snatched them and you dropped them.” She insisted that I threw them on the floor. So, then she’s yelling at me (not horribly) admonishing me in a more stern tone. Some of the kids said, “No Fred didn’t throw them on the floor, you snatched them, you dropped them.” And, so she flipped out (Laughing). They were saying “No Fred didn’t” and she was saying, “I’m gonna tell the principal” and they were saying “No, no we’re gonna tell the principle that Fred didn’t do that.” So she says, “Who is the principal going to believe me or you niggers?!” And it was like “Oh sh–.” The class went wacko. Everybody started jumping up and down, screaming and yelling (makes screaming noises). “You didn’t say that, you didn’t say that!” So, the bell rings for the class day to start and we are all

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piling out of the room yelling at her and calling her names. Henry and I (Chip – referring to Henry) go to our class, architectural drawing or something like that. So, I am sitting in architectural drawing and we’re talking like, “Man, do you believe she said that? I‘m not going back to class tomorrow. I am not putting up with that.” All of a sudden the door burst open and it’s the principal, the assistant principal yelling, “Fred Cooke, come with me.” They snatch me out of there, and I tell Mr. Rhodes who is the assistant principal for the 9th grade, a guy named George Rhodes, who ultimately became superintendent of schools here. He became principal of McKinley and then superintendent of the schools. I tell George who became a friend in a strange sort of way long after this incident. I told George basically what happened. Fortunately, some of the other kids confirmed this. So, George says, “Okay. I hear you, but you were wrong. I’m going to suspend you, but I am not going to kick you out of school. You cannot go to homeroom and you cannot go to your other classes. You will stay here with me and you’re going to go to algebra class three times a day with me, and you’re going to do the homework for each algebra class and your other classes.” I protested to no avail. I liked algebra, but not that much. I did that for about a week. The homeroom teacher had a nervous breakdown, and never came back to school. So, we got a new homeroom teacher, a woman named Inez Elliot. She was a Black woman, taught English.

You were told she had a nervous breakdown?
Yeah, we were told she a nervous breakdown. She went away and she never came back. So, Inez Elliot became our homeroom teacher. Inez had been at the

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school and sort of knew about me through the rumor mill (Laughter). She disliked me from day one (Laughter).
It’s because you made that lady have a nervous breakdown (Laughs)
So, Ms. Elliot and I just fought all the time. She was a very prim and proper lady, very old school. Didn’t brook any sort of smart alecking from her students. I, of course, believed in smart alecking. It was to my core. So, she and I butted heads all the time. She would send me to George Rhodes’ office all the time because I was acting up in homeroom. He wouldn’t suspend me from school. She and I would just get into arguments and she would say “Go see Mr. Rhodes.” As I remember, Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Jewel (this is over time I think maybe my 10th grade year, Mr. Rhodes had become the principal of the school). Mr. Jewel was the assistant principal for boys, I guess that’s what they called him. And, so I was in his clutches. I would go see Mr. Jewel, I would go see Mr. Rhodes all the time because Ms. Elliot would send me down there. This is how crazy the world is, Ms. Elliot, by the time I graduated high school (I was in her homeroom for almost 4 years) she said that I was just a problem personality and that if I really buckled down my life would be a lot better, that I was really wasting my life. She really hoped that I would get squared away, but she wasn’t optimistic because she had seen me go in the wrong direction for too long. We sort of parted like that.

When I graduated from law school, I graduated magna cum laude (or whatever they call it). I was managing editor of the law review and I thought that I had done well in school. The day of graduation was a warm day. It was actually very warm (in those days Howard’s graduation was in June as opposed to now

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when they graduate like on Mother’s Day) so the temperature had cranked up some more. I decided that I would wear basically a sweatshirt and jeans under my gown. The gowns were rented, the caps we bought. At graduation, I graduated and my parents and I were going back to the house or whatever. I was not living at home at that point, but anyway. I had parked my car near the campus. I had turned in my gown, gotten my diploma and was on my way to my car. I am walking up Georgia Avenue and I run into Ms. Elliot.
Awww (Laughs).
Now, it turns out that Ms. Elliot had, her daughter had graduated from Howard the same day getting a Masters’ in English or something like that, English Education or something like that. But, anyway, she was there for her daughter’s graduation. She was walking down the street and going to her car or wherever. She sees me. I go “Oh, how you doing Ms. Elliot?” She says, “Oh, Mr. Cooke.” She asks “What are you doing here?” She says, “My daughter graduated.” I said, “Oh.” She says, “I see you haven’t done anything with your life. You’re just walking around now” (because I had on my sweatshirt and jeans). Now, I have to decide if I tell her I that I had just graduated from law school magna? I decide “No.” I tell her “You know you were right Ms. Elliot. I really should have applied myself more.” (Laughter)
Sounds like that smart aleckiness stuck with you.
Oh yeah. I just walked on and went on to my car. I didn’t explain to her. She was so sure that I was a failure, and I was happy to confirm that for her (Laughs). But anyway, so I go to McKinley and I’m in ROTC. They have Junior ROTC at

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McKinley. It was a big deal that all of us young guys wanted to be in ROTC. All the BMOCs were in ROTC. It just was the thing to do. We had a huge JROTC population. We had the biggest JROTC program in the city at McKinley High School. We had three regiments of cadets, and we were very proud of that. Often, we would win the competitions among the schools. Actually, we won most of the time. Our big rivals were Dunbar High School, and we would battle them for supremacy. This is where I sort of got hooked into a military kind of thing from the time I was in the 9th grade through senior high school. I was in this military thing. We carried these rifles around, and could field strip an M-1. We marched around. I was in Honor Company one year, and we won the Honor Company competition for the city one year when I was in E Company. I was in E Company in the 10th grade, I was in A Company in the 11th grade, and then, after I got to be an officer, I was assigned to, I was a battalion supply officer which is where they put people who don’t do anything. I didn’t do anything. I was very upset about that. Captain Brown who was the guy who ran the ROTC program made all these decisions as to who would get to be an officer and what position you would hold. For some reason, because I really wasn’t very big I was only about 5’10” (I grew about 4 inches by the time that I graduated from college), I probably weighed about 119, 118 pounds. I was not a presence. So, he decided I was a supply officer, and I didn’t want to be a supply officer. But I was a supply officer. So I did that, and I was a battalion supply officer (a pretty easy job). But anyway, I did that and I enjoyed ROTC. So when I went to Howard, as a freshman, ROTC was still mandatory at Howard for the first two years. It was

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like really bizarre. Nobody could believe it. People who came from other places across the country just did not understand how that could be.
What year did you start Howard again?
’65, September ’65.

So you started Howard in September 1965.
Right. I had gone through ROTC for this four years in high school and it seemed like it was part of going to school. But, to people who came from other places this was not normal. When Howard said you had to be in ROTC for the first two years, people were like this is crazy, I’m not doing this. There was huge dissension, and the “anti-war” thing was just starting to build. I joined Air Force ROTC because at that point I wanted to be a pilot. I thought that I was going to be an engineer. I was going to be a pilot, and Air Force ROTC was the way to go. I knew guys who had been to Vietnam in the Army. A friend of mine, a guy who was a class ahead of me in high school, a guy named Reynard Bouknight, his brother got killed in Vietnam when we were in high school. His brother was one of the early guys, in one of the early battles. The battle of Ia Drang. They made a movie about t called We Were Soldiers with Mel Gibson. My friend’s brother was one of the soldiers who died in that incident. So I knew guys who had died. Guys who had graduated from JROTC had gone and joined the Marine Corps, joined the Army, and they would come back home with their uniforms on and we would see them. I didn’t want to be in the Army. I wanted to be in the Air Force. I wanted to fly. So, I joined the Air Force ROTC at Howard because you had to be in the Army or Air Force. Pretty soon after that year began, people started

protesting the war. It became this huge thing. When I was a sophomore (maybe I was a junior, I forget which), Howard eliminated the requirement that ROTC was mandatory for your freshman and sophomore years. It became completely voluntary. The only people in ROTC were those who wanted to be, which I think made eminent sense. But, I stayed in. Then I joined what they called POC (Professional Officers Corps) where you go into the advance phase of it to become an officer in ROTC, to take the courses that lead to a commission, and maybe a career in the Air Force. Halfway through my freshman year, before halfway through maybe in the first month of half my freshman year, I decided that I no longer wanted to be an engineer because I hated all the math they were making me do. And, I couldn’t do it. It was hard. I did not want to do it anymore. I asked them to let me out of the program, and I was told that I could not get out until the end of the school year.” So, by the time I was a sophomore I was out of the School of Engineering and Architecture, as they called it in those days, and I was in the College of Liberal Arts. Much better. I became a psychology major because I thought I wanted to be a doctor. I was going to be a psychiatrist, but I figured I would major in psychology with a natural science minor and get myself prepped up to go to med school or take another year in grad school and take science courses and go to med school. That was my plan. So, I’m in ROTC and I’m doing this stuff in school. Howard is going through a real transformation. The whole “Black” thing is really getting to be very prominent thought at school. Howard had been, and still is in the view of most people a pretty conservative institution. The students began to articulate ideas about Black

nationalism, Pan-Africanism, things that were sort of outside the mainstream of what Howard traditionally had taught. One of the weird things is that when I got to Howard in 1965, jazz was not taught in the School of Music. It just wasn’t taught. (Laughs) A lot of students thought “Wait a minute.” If Black people are a primary source of jazz in America, what do you mean you don’t teach it? So students were like, “Oh, hell no Howard has to teach and celebrate jazz and other aspects of African American culture.” We were in protest mode almost all the time. Against the University, against the larger culture. I remember that when I was at Howard as a freshman, there was a woman at Howard who was a couple years ahead of me (she was a junior maybe, starting her junior year), I was starting my freshman year, a woman named Robin Gregory who had gone to McKinley High School. I knew Robin from McKinley (not ‘knew’ her because she was two years ahead of me and seniors would never dare to talk to sophomores), but I knew who she was. And, Robin was a cutie, a cheerleader, you know homecoming queen kind of girl. Robin decided that she was going to run for homecoming queen at Howard, okay. Well, the big controversy was that Robin was not going to have her hair straightened. She was going to wear it natural, an Afro. That just freaked the administration out. The University administration did not want her to represent the University as Miss Homecoming Queen with an Afro. No! No!” And the students said, “Yes, yes!” And, so the students elected Robin as the homecoming queen with this big ‘fro, this kind of Angela Davis kinda afro. The administration was just flummoxed, they just couldn’t believe it and they were just so upset. They threatened to cancel

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homecoming. It was really crazy. The really kind of over the top moment was when at the homecoming coronation. It was held in the big auditorium called Cramton Auditorium at the University. The students had (it is really a student-run deal although the University has the bless it) had Robin on this sort of huge lazy Susan that sort of revolved around. They had the lights done in such a way that the way it happened was you could see her silhouette before you could see Robin, the silhouette of her with that big ‘fro. The students went berserk.

(Laughs) That’s great.
It was just great. And, then you see Robin (she was a very attractive woman). The students were happy about it, but the University not so much. So there were all kinds of things like that going on. The Commanding General of the Selective Service System came to Howard to talk about the Selective Service, about the draft and about registering and what the draft meant. The students booed him off stage, wouldn’t let him talk. Security had to take him away to protect his physical safety. We did all kinds of stuff that was just very non-traditional against what Howard had been. Big, big debates about all kinds of stuff, on civil rights issues. All this is going on. We closed school down a number of times in protest of the war in Vietnam, the Cambodian incursion, University policies on dorm visitation, and more.
How did you close the school down?
We just took over/occupied the A building. We took over the Administration Building and just said, “No. Nothing is going to happen. No business as usual. You know, no business will be conducted today.” We did that, oh I was there

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from ’65 to ’72, and in that seven year period we probably closed the school down in at least five of those years.
And you were one of the people that went into the buildings?
Oh yeah. We were shutting it down. When I was in law school we were providing legal counsel to the students. Of course, practicing without a license, but it didn’t stop us. (Laughter). We had to do that. When Dr. King was killed in ’68, the school closed down of course. Actually, we had already closed the school down when Dr. King was assassinated. Then, a number of students were caught up in that kind of stuff. Because I was from D.C., I knew how to get around the check points that the U.S. military had set up throughout the city. So when they declared martial law and had these curfews, some of us who knew how to get around the city would go around the checkpoints and go all over the city. Mostly, we were looking for students who had been arrested, or had been trapped in different parts of the city and couldn’t get back to campus. Because parents and University officials were looking for them. Obviously, it would be a concern if your kid is here from Kentucky, and you see the city’s on fire. You want to know where your kid is. Well, we were trying to help find out. So, we would forge passes, and stuff like that and go around the city looking for students.

I remember when I was in ROTC, actually I got to be…in my senior year I was a lieutenant colonel and operations officer, so I would plan all the things that we were going to do. All of the exercises. So we would be out on the campus in little formations doing things. The students would come and stand in our formations to protest the war and protest fascism or militarism or whatever they

were talking about. So, they made it physically difficult to be on campus. Because students would get into arguments with the ROTC students. It really wasn’t that they were necessarily assaulting us. They would just stand in the way just to be in the way. The ROTC guys being guys would push them out of the way, and that would lead to confrontations. At a point, some students, or somebody set fire to the ROTC building. It was a big temporary building that was built during World War II, and housed the Army and Air Force ROTC student offices. The building burned to the ground, but no one was hurt. After that I issued this order that said that you didn’t have to wear your uniform except when you were in drill. Before that, we would wear the uniforms three days a week, two days a week and on drill days you’d wear it all day. I said, “You don’t have to do that. Only wear your uniform when you are in drill.” Because it got to be a problem. It got to be a hassle. So I had a locker on campus, and I would bring my uniform, change, run out and go back in and change again because it got to be such a problem. But, the weird part about that was that these guys who were protesting ROTC were my friends. We were all shutting the school down together. We were protesting the war in Viet Nam, and other stuff. We were doing all kinds of other crazy stuff. So I was always concerned. One of the things that I was concerned about was, getting my commission. I was convinced that the FBI, or whoever was watching us would see me at these demonstrations. So it was like how could you be an officer in the Air Force if you’re subversive. But they gave me a commission anyway. I could never figure that out (Laughter).

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I kept thinking ‘I wouldn’t give me a commission.’ It was a great, great, great experience.
When Dr. King was assassinated in April 1968, I was just finishing up my sophomore, or junior year. That affected me to the extent that I spent most of the summer trying to figure out what was I going do about that. Was I going to go into the Air Force? Because at that point I was already in the advanced program, and I would have had to try to figure a way to get out. I was trying to figure out should I get out and if I was going to get out, how was I going to get out. I was trying to figure out how I could be helpful. How I could use this education I was getting to some constructive benefit. I decided that I did not want to be a doctor anymore. I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. Now, I had never met a lawyer. But I decided that I would become a lawyer. So I decided between the end of my junior year and the beginning of my senior year that I was going to go to law school, and that was my way to make a contribution.

Do you remember the thought process that led you to decide that you wanted to be a lawyer?
Well, it was mostly seeing on TV and reading in newspapers that lawyers were filing lawsuits and representing people who were protestors or demonstrators. I thought that was something that I could do and could make a better contribution.
I was quite frankly not too interested in being beaten senseless like John Lewis. I thought that being a lawyer was a way that I could contribute in a constructive way. So, I decided to go to law school. Over that summer I decided to go. A good friend of mine, a guy named Francis Kennard, decided he was going to go to

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law school too. Well, the reason I had been talking to Francis was that Francis had been kicked out of Howard his junior year because he had been too active in the student protests his sophomore year. Francis went to Ithaca College in Ithaca, NY to sit out his year suspension. We would talk to Francis while he was in Ithaca because he hated it and, rightfully so. It was awful.
It’s cold man.
It’s cold. Just awful. Francis who is from Baltimore came back and he and I started hanging out. He had been readmitted and promised to be good (which of course was a lie). So Francis and I talked about what to do and he said he was going to law school and I said I thought I was going to go to law school too. We were walking around campus one day and we decide to go to the University testing office or service, whatever they call it, to find out about this LSAT that we had heard about. We didn’t know anything about it. We said “What is that and when can we take it?” “Do we have to take it to go to law school and when do we take it. And, how much does it cost?” The people there said “Well, you know, this is what you have to do to go to law school, everybody has to take it, it costs $50 or whatever the number was, and they’re going to give one (at Howard I think, but I am not sure) at Howard in two weeks.” And we said, “Okay, put us down.” (Laughter) We didn’t know. They said okay we will waive the fee for you guys if you want to take it. So we said okay put us down. We show back up in two weeks with no clue, totally clueless. We take the LSAT and were like “Man, what was that?” (Laughter) It was horrible. Time goes by and we were also looking at law schools. We were trying to figure out where we were going to

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apply. So we got looked at a number of law schools that we were going to apply to. We thought Harvard, Cornell. I don’t remember exactly. I may have applied to four or five law schools. I am not sure. Then I get the LSAT scores and I have no idea what the scores mean. I’m sending them to the law schools. I had no idea what they meant. I don’t really remember, but I think we got just sort of middling, high average scores. I didn’t study for it. I just went in and took it. I had no idea what I was doing.

That’s great.
So, then I applied to law schools, and in this process I get accepted I think at Harvard but they don’t have any more scholarship money, and I could not go if there is no scholarship money. I get accepted to Cornell. Strangely enough, about the time I get accepted to Cornell, I see on the cover of Newsweek or Time (I forget which) Black law students at Cornell with rifles as part of a student protest. I’m thinking “I don’t think I need to go there.” So, I crossed Cornell off my list, and I wind up going to Howard. It was a pretty easy transition. I didn’t have to move. I knew what the deal was. The law school was on campus with the University y. I had sort of seen the law school, so I figured I could go there. So, I decided to go to law school at Howard. That was really the best decision I made. I really think in retrospect I would not have been successful at most any other law school. Certainly not a predominantly White law school, because I was not psychologically ready to deal with that part of the world. I was still in this cocoon that was really the best place for me to be at that point of time in my life. I really wouldn’t have handled it well.

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So, I went to Howard, and had a great experience. I met a guy named Clay Smith there. My very first day of law school I met J. Clay Smith who graduated from law school in ’67, this is in the fall of ’69. He graduated in ’67. He was working on his master’s at GW. He saw me standing out in front of the law school, and it’s just total fortuity. He stops me and my good friend Gil Ray (a classmate of mine) and he asks us, “What are you guys doing?” We said, “Well we are new to the law school, just trying to figure out what’s going on.” He says, “Well look, I graduated from law school and this is what you need to pay attention to.” He basically told us what we needed to do to be successful in law school. How we had to study, how we had to spend time in the library, etc. My eyes sort of glazed over, because what he told us sounded like a lot of work. I hadn’t really, you know, I wanted to be a lawyer. I didn’t have any idea what the task involved. I had been a pretty good student, in undergrad. But, undergrad is a different kind of thing.

Did you study hard in undergrad? How would you characterize?
I studied hard in fits, in spurts. I studied hard when I needed to. Most of it you could sort of you know read and get through and negotiate in class. Exams were sufficiently loosey-goosey so that you weren’t pressed too hard all the time. I had a pretty good GPA in my major and a pretty good overall GPA. I wasn’t really working as hard as I could have or should have until I got to law school. After I talked to Clay, I realized that I really needed to change the way I was doing business, and that I really had to work hard at this if I was going to be successful

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at it. I became a much better student in law school than I had been in undergraduate school.
For the record, did you graduate with a degree in psychology?
Yes. I graduated with a degree in psychology in 1969. A B.S. because I had that crazy natural science minor. Zoology and microbiology, horrible course that I took because in the beginning I thought I was going to go to med school. I got the B.S. in Psychology and then went to Howard. I was in a relatively small class at Howard. There were only about one hundred and eighteen, or some number like that, in the class. Which was significantly smaller than classes had been in the recent past. And, certainly, smaller than the classes after for reasons they didn’t mention. For some reason my class was small. Can’t quite figure out why that is. The class was older than most classes. A lot of people had masters’ degrees, or had work experience in some area their undergraduate degree and then decided to go back to law school. I was one of the relatively few people who (I say out of 118 there must have been only about maybe 20 0r 25 who had gone straight through) and I was sort of younger and had gone straight through. That was sort of okay. There were some interesting characters in my class. People who had done stuff. It made it more difficult for the professors because you had people who had some real world experience and were saying, “Well, I don’t like that.” So professors weren’t all that keen on the push back. But, it was a good experience. Clay got me on a track that ultimately led to my getting a scholarship. I had my tuition paid for the last two years by the Ford Foundation Scholarship that the law school had. I did well enough to get that. At the end of

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my first year of law school, near the end of my first year, we closed school down again. The University closed because we got tired of something. So, the whole University shut down.
(Laughter)

It was unfortunate in terms of the timing because then it was like a finals problem. And, then did you just have one set of exams?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So they were all in the spring, right?

Yeah, yeah. It was back in the Stone Age when you got one exam and it was at the end of the spring semester. So courses were two semesters long and you got one exam. Well, most of the courses. I guess we had one course that was one semester. So the University types said that the students could take ‘take-home exams’ or ‘pass-fail exams’ and that would suffice. So the law school administration tells the students that we can take ‘pass-fail’, or and we can take ‘take-home exams.’ So I and about five other people in the first year class said no. Our contract with the law school says I get an exam, and I want a real exam because I don’t want to take a sit down exam for the first time at the end of my second year. I want to do it now. I want to know where I am. So, many of my classmates told us that we were out of your minds. But about six of us insisted on sit down exams. We insisted on that. And, they gave us sit down exams. So we took this sort of normal, well, semi normal, exams — first-year sit downs. The good thing about that was that we did better than most everybody. That is why I

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got the Ford Foundation Scholarship because I had a GPA (laughing) as opposed to a pass-fail. So we did that and…
(interrupting) How was your first year? How was the experience of your first- year courses and learning the law?

It was hard, it was difficult, but it was also very enlightening. We had some professors who had been involved in the civil rights movement. Guys like Elwood Chisholm, people who are not well known as lawyers in the movement but had been involved. I mean, you know, Thurgood Marshall and Jim Nabrit and others had a lot of people helping them. They were great lawyers, and I am not trying to take anything from them but they had a lot of guys helping them. And, some of these guys were guys who were teaching at the law school. The law school was a very significant part of the incubation process for some of the ideas, where some of the ideas were test-driven and researched. So, Chick Chisholm (Elwood Chisolm) and some of the other faculty were part of that. They would tell us great war stories about things that went on. One of the things I remember Chick Chisolm taught me was, he taught civil procedure — it was just like a completely crazy course. Because I had no context. And the way they teach you civil procedure is as though it means something to you when you’ve never been into a courthouse as a practitioner, it’s like “What is all this stupid stuff mean.” But, anyway, one of the things he taught us was to approach it like you would if you were a carpenter or some kind of workman and that there are tools to do different tasks. Sometimes you have to get the task accomplished when you don’t have that particular tool. And, he was sort of interested in teaching us not only

how to use the rules of civil procedure to accomplish the intended purpose, but how you could use rules to accomplish purposes that the rules were not necessarily built for. For example, how when a judge is trying to keep you from doing something that needs to get done you have to be prepared to do it another way. This was borne out of experience with hostile judges who were not particularly sympathetic to his arguments in court. It was interesting because for us, or for me, it began to put civil procedure into some context. It was not just this abstract bunch of rules. It was difficult because it was kinda crazy stuff that I had no anchor to. I wound up reading the civil procedure book all the way from the beginning to the end by the end of the first semester. And I read it again through the second semester. That, I think, was useful to me. The second time around stuff sort of made sense especially after you’ve gone through the book. See, stuff at the beginning of the book was related to stuff at the end of the book except you don’t know that yet because you haven’t gotten to the end of the book (Laughter). By the time I had made the loop once and began to read it the second time, I was like “Oh, I get it.” Civil procedure and real property and corporations and torts and all that stuff they make you take as first years, at Howard at least. Again, a very limited curriculum. They had very, very, very few electives. Everybody was taking the same thing. Evidence, crim law, crim procedure. It was a little bit odd because I didn’t know anything about it, but it was a lot of fun. I learned a lot. I thought there was a huge intellectual challenge of trying to learn stuff that other guys knew and were good at. I figured “Well I can do that, I just have to work at it.” So, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the kind of the solitude and trying

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to work through logic that a case was about or what the principle was. I just sort of liked that. It was a great stroke of luck for me because it was something that I did not know that I would be particularly interested in substantively. Or even that I had any real aptitude for. I didn’t really know that. I mean, I hoped that, but I didn’t know that. It turned out that I really enjoyed it and I was fairly good at it. So, I had a great time my first year. That was part of the reason why we insisted on the exams because I wanted the full experience. I wanted it all.

So, I finished the first year and I get this scholarship, and I get invited to participate in the law review. And, so I become a staff person. Then we decide “You know we should try to figure out a way to be the host of the National Conference of Law Reviews. Get the Conference to come to DC. We could get a bunch of judges who are already here. Blah blah blah.” So we make this big pitch to host it. And lo and behold they say “Yeah.” (Laughs). And, we go “Oh no, why’d they do that.” We went down to the conference. That year it was in Williamsburg Virginia, William and Mary, they were the host school. We had put in our proposal before the conference. We go to the conference and they announce at the conference where the next conference was to be held and they announce it’s us. And, we were like “Gee mcree I didn’t think that was going to happen.” So, it was really pretty cool. So, then I got elected to be the chairman of the National Conference of Law Reviews for our host year. I also got elected to be managing editor of the journal. It was really kind of a pain because I was really doing two jobs. I really didn’t need that.
It’s a lot of work.

Mr. Cooke:

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Yeah, it was a lot of work. I was working to make money to pay the rent. The scholarship only covered the tuition.
Oh, so you had a job?
Oh yeah.

What was your job?
I had a bunch of jobs man. I worked with the Boy Scouts in their office they used to be up at Connecticut and Florida. I worked for the Naval Electronic Systems Command, I was a clerk. I ugh, what else did I do? I worked at the Library of Congress. So I had different jobs. Multiple and at the same time sometimes. So we did that and that was work the second, for the third year, it was work. The second year was work too.
In the spring of 1971 I went to Mississippi as part of the Howard University Mississippi Project. I went to work for North Mississippi Rural Legal Services that was headquartered in Oxford, Mississippi. But, as it turned out, I worked in Greenwood, Mississippi in an office there.
And, if I may interrupt, this was the summer?
No.
I’m sorry.
(chuckles) This was even more crazy than that. This is the second semester of my second year in law school.
Second semester of your second year.
Yeah. I just left school. I just pfft, I’m outta here. I went to work in Mississippi. So this was a ugh, but did you get course credit for this work or no?

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Well, what happened was this: Howard had this thing called The Howard University Mississippi Project where…
(interrupting) Could you explain that?
Where students from all the schools and colleges went to Mississippi to work on different things. Some of it was in the summer and some of it was during the school year. Now, what was supposed to happen was that the different schools and colleges would give you (you’re right) course credit for going to work in Mississippi during the school year. If you were in the College of Dentistry or if you were in the School of Divinity or if you were in the School of Social Work they had programs set up where you got credit for some course or courses for working a semester or, whatever it was, in Mississippi. Well, our school didn’t have one because they kept saying, “Well, we can’t teach law in Mississippi. You are a student. You can’t practice law so you can’t go unless you want to go in the summer.” I wanted to go to Mississippi right now (then). So, I go to Mississippi. I need to go to Mississippi. [End Side A, Tape 2]…

(Laughs)
I gotta go.
And state, and the year was again?
This is spring ’71.
Okay.
Early spring ’71. Like January, like right at the beginning of the semester. I decided I have to go to Mississippi. I can’t wait. I can’t wait ‘til summer. I have to go now. So, my classmates are telling me “You know you can’t just leave

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school, you’ve got to go to class.” And, tell them that, “I don’t have to go to class because I’m going to Mississippi.” So, I tell my professors that I’m going to Mississippi. And I’m going to be gone for six weeks, I’m going to Mississippi, So, I take my law books. And you know I figured that I would read stuff when I get a chance, and catch up when I get back. So I go to Mississippi. I fly to Memphis and then drive from Memphis to Greenwood (where I’m going to go to work).

By yourself? Or do you have other people with you?
Oh no, no. Well, there are other people there but I’m…
(interrupting) but you’re traveling by yourself.
But there are other people there. There’s a guy there, the guy who runs the office in Greenwood is a guy who, Black guy, who was the third Black graduate of the University of Mississippi Law School. And, I later found out that it was named the James O. Eastland School of Justice which I always found humorous. But anyway, I go there and he’s there. A guy who had gone to Howard’s Law School, a guy named John Brittain, who now works for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. John Brittain, in between he was the Dean at Texas Southern’s Law School. John is there and some more people are there and a couple were students from other schools than Howard. So, we go and we, I’m in Greenwood you know. We work in the office there and we’re doing outreach. We’re trying to get people registered to vote. We’re trying to get people housing and public assistance because they’re entitled to it. There happens to be another bit of irony. There’s a protest there because there is a White-owned, Black-formatted radio

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station in Greenwood Mississippi that the owner is now going to convert the format to Country and Western. And, the Black community which is the predominant in terms of numbers, not economics but the numbers, doesn’t have a station formatted that they particularly care for. So they want to protest. So, we help with the protest. The guy’s name, Alex Sanders is the guy who runs the office from the University of Mississippi Law School and he’s from Greenwood. So, I had never been that far south. Again, this is really weird, this is my second year in law school and I still hadn’t been anywhere. I hadn’t been to New York City. I hadn’t been to Chicago. But, I guess I had been to Chicago. I went to Chicago to eh, no that was later on that year. I hadn’t been to Chicago yet. I went to Chicago at the end of that year. But I hadn’t been anywhere. I had been to New Orleans. The Air Force took me to New Orleans and I, so I had been to New Orleans.

So you really hadn’t been out of the South because Baltimore is…
(interrupting) No. North Carolina was the farthest south I’d been.
Wow.
So I get to Mississippi and this is virulent racism. This is like, this is like anything I had seen in North Carolina was a day at the beach compared to this. Because there the people, the White people were so ugly that if you went into a store they would not touch you. They would not put money in your hand. It was like one of these deals where you had to put the money on the counter and they’d put the change on the counter. They would not touch you. There was no direct contact. And it was real hostile.

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In 1971.
In 1971.
Wow.
1971. And, it was ugly and I had never seen that kind of virulent racism before. So, one day, me and another guy who was from Mississippi, not Alex but another guy, who had been there (worked there longer than I had)….tornadoes had come through and had wreaked a lot of havoc and they were sharecroppers. You know I had never seen a real plantation. They had real plantations. And these Black people who lived in theses ‘shotgun’ houses.’

All cotton fields.
Yeah, all cotton fields. Lived in these shotgun houses. Dirt floors, no indoor plumbing. They had these houses sort of arranged on a little horseshoe, semi- circle. And, water came up to the front porch kind of thing (it was a common porch on these houses) and that’s where the water came to but there was no water in the house. It was just up there and you’d get water there. So the tornadoes had come through and knocked a bunch of these shotgun houses down and people didn’t have any place to stay. Red Cross and whoever had put up a place for people to stay at the schools and public buildings. But the people at this particular shotgun house wouldn’t leave. They said they wouldn’t leave because the plantation owner, their boss, the guy who owned the place said if they left, you know, they wouldn’t be able to come back to there and they couldn’t leave there because they needed work. So, we were saying to them, “You know you can’t do that, you have to take care of the kids, or you have families and you need to get

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them warm food, and a warm place to stay” So, we’re over here trying to get them to do that and trying help them get this assistance. And, some guy, a foreman, tells us we have to leave. We’re on private property and we can’t be there. We were like “pfft, we can do what we want to do.” So he says he’s gonna call the sheriff. So we leave. So we go back the next day with Alex because he is from there and maybe he knows these people or knows of them, maybe he could get them to agree to get out of this situation. So we go. So we’re talking to them. Sort of out in the distance we could see this pickup truck (that the people told us was the foreman’s pickup truck). We did not want to have another confrontation, but we were not going to leave, or let the foreman tell us what to do. Then all of a sudden we hear this noise, it sounds like gunfire. And we hear this “pfffew” and realize that they are shooting at us. So we hop in the car and we (makes revving noise) and we start to drive away. So the guy that’s driving is the guy, I think from Connecticut. He’s not from there. So we’re driving and we come to this place where there’s this sort of almost this fork. One side goes down to like this pond and the other side goes out to the highway. So the guy from Connecticut doesn’t know where he’s going. He takes the wrong road and goes down to the pond. But that turned out to be a great stroke of luck because the guys in the pickup truck figured nobody is stupid enough to go down to the pond because there’s nowhere to go. So they go out toward the highway.

Oh my gosh!

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And so they don’t get us. We go back, and we go out the other way. Probably not related, but somebody fire bombed Alex’s mom’s house while I was there. It was ugly.
Wow.
So I’m there for a while and I’m calling back every once in a while to find out how things are at school ” So then one day Alex, John Brittain and I we decide we’re going to go to Jackson because the Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier fight will be broadcast to a movie theater there. So we decide to go to the fight on like Saturday night, or something like that, to go to Jackson. And the fight is telecast in (unintelligible, Tape # 2 Side B @672). But, it’s really kind of weird because there’s all these rednecks in there who hate Ali, right. And he’s like, he’s a hero to us.
Right.
So we are like tiptoeing around who we want to win the fight because we’re not sure that we could live through it. So we do that. So after about six weeks, you know, my time is up. I have to go back because I probably need to get back to class eventually.
Can I stop you just a second? And I’ll ask you, are there any other memories of your time in Mississippi that, I mean, it just seems for such a young man at a time in our nation’s history when so much was changing and happening and to be in such a situation, I wouldn’t asking…
Well, you know what, we went to the rally, protest rally for the radio station that they were going to change the format to and we’re in this church or building (I

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don’t know, it’s not a big building, about 50 people). So, we’re in there and we’re talking about what we’re going to do and how we’re going to protest and how we’re going to try to make economic impact on the merchants who advertise on the radio station. To let them know that we are unhappy about that, and that people are going to stop patronizing the stores as a way to convince them to convince the station owner to change the format back. There’s this explosion (boom). Lights go out. Everybody’s on the floor. People are panicking like “Oh, God we’re going to get shot here.” Turns out that some sort of transformer blew out. It was a total happenstance.

(Laughs)
But, JB who in those days always carried a gun (I stayed close to him and I knew that if anything happened JB was going to have his gun) and maybe we could scare people off, if nothing else.
And who is JB again?
John Brittain. Yeah, John Brittain used to drive around in a Triumph sports car with his gun (it was a .38) on the passenger seat. Always when he was in Mississippi because he used to say, “They’ll never shoot me without me shooting at least one of them or getting somebody.” We went all over Greenwood (in the Delta), Greenwood, Rolling Fork, Belzoni, Itta Bena, Sunflower. There were a bunch of places around there were we went and met with people and tried to help people. Mostly with voter registration. Mostly trying to help people deal with these crazy plantation owners who were just abusing them. In these classic company store kind of things where, you know, you didn’t get paid in money you

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got this script that only “Bob Plantation Owner” cashed. It was only good in “Bob Plantation Owner’s” store. It was unbelievable. You know, I just, you know I read about that stuff in law school and I just thought “this can’t be.” But, this is 1971 and it is alive and well. This was not a fiction. This was not something some author was creating to kind of create a huge vivid thing that would make me excited. I was seeing it. It was really kind of weird.

So, I was there for a while. We went to a lot of churches and rallies with ministers and people trying to get people to do stuff. It was a very inhospitable time. Obviously, there were some folks of good will of both races who were really trying to move past all that lunacy. But, there seemed to be so many people that were just absolutely invested in that kind of craziness. There weren’t about to make a change. It was just crazy. You, know my mom didn’t want me to go to Mississippi.
What about your dad?
My dad didn’t want me to go to Mississippi, but he did not argue with me about it because he knew there was no point to it, to the discussion. But my mom really, really didn’t want me to go to Mississippi. That was sad because she was very unhappy about my decision to go to Mississippi. But I told her “I have to go, I have to go to Mississippi. I have to do this.” If I had come back in a box, you know, that’s what I had to do. It was interesting because I remember as a kid (I was younger than he was), I remember Emmett Till’s death. That scared the hell out of me as a kid. To see this teenager killed and his really grotesque body picture they had of him at the time. And, I thought, “Man, these are some very,

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very mean people; they’ll do anything.” So that was sort of one of the things that was in my mind. But it was one of those things where I wanted to conquer the fear. I didn’t want to be paralyzed into doing nothing because I was afraid. I thought that if I let those people make me that afraid then nothing good would ever happen. It’s kinda like jumping out of airplanes when I was in the Air Force. I jumped out of airplanes and I was very afraid. But it was one of those things I had to do. I had to make myself jump out of those airplanes.

How did you feel when you were (that story about being chased on the farm), how did you feel when they were chasing you?
I thought they were going to kill us. I did think (that was kind of like the Emmett Till moment), I thought that they were going to kill us and hang us or kill us. Just shoot us and leave us there dead and say that we were somehow, you know, the big word in those days were ‘outside agitators.’ We were somehow outside agitators and that created some kind of reason why we needed to be dead. And, nobody would know or care. I had seen all these crazy stories where justice in the Mississippi legal system as well as the federal system didn’t really exist for Black people by and large. People would get killed and nobody would ever figure out who did it although everybody knew who did it. Or people would be found not guilty like in the Emmett Till case. The guy would go to the Saturday Evening Post or Look Magazine and confess after he was acquitted. So, I was very, very afraid. I was really more afraid when they blew up Alex’s mom’s house because I figured we could’ve died in our sleep. After trying to get a few hours’ sleep after working hard all day. Some crazy guy just blew her house up. I mean, that

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frightened me more than these guys. That was frightening but that was temporal. That was like “Whoa it’s over, phew. I’m just not going back over there again.” These guys that would just throw a bomb with a couple sticks of dynamite through your window at night, Jesus, you know.

This could happen anytime.
Anytime. Yeah. That was scary. That was just a constant worry. You just never knew when one of these guys would get drunk enough or angry enough to take a couple sticks of dynamite and drive by 3:30 in the morning and just, phew, blow you up. I don’t know how guys like Dr. King and other people in the civil rights movement when it was even worse than I’m talking about, when they were in the mid-‘50s through ‘60s. I don’t know, I can’t imagine how much anxiety that produced. I guess at a point it just becomes normal behavior. You just accept that it’s a part of what your life is and you don’t dwell on it. But man, the house blowing up thing scared me. That happened after I was there for about three or four weeks. It had only been a couple weeks that I was constantly worrying about being blown up as opposed to the whole six weeks. (Laughs) But that was enough.
Wow. How were the folks down there, the African Americans?
Beaten down. Absolutely beaten down. That was a problem. There’s a book written, The Miseducation of the Negro, by Carter G. Woodson. In the book Carter G. Woodson says some other things but one of the most insidious things about racism, segregation in this country is that, when you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You don’t have to keep a

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Black person in their place by force, they will learn. If you teach them well enough they will learn their place. They will assume it automatically. So, what happened to a lot of people was that they had for so many years, generations of that mentality. Too many of them accepted it. And there clearly were people there who, like Fannie Lou Hamer and lots of other heroes and heroines who bucked the system and knew there was a different way to live, but for Joe Average it was just accepted. When I went on active duty in the Air Force in 1978….
(interrupting) Was that after law school?
Yeah, that was after law school. I went to Cocoa Beach, Florida at an Air Force base called Patrick Air Force Base in Cocoa Beach, Florida. It was on the east coast of Florida not too far from Cape Canaveral. That was one of its missions, to support the Cape Canaveral activities. But, down the east coast of Florida runs the Florida East Coast Railway. It runs down the east coast of Florida and almost invariably on the inland side of the railroad is a Black community. There’s Cocoa and there’s Cocoa Beach. There’s almost always a city that almost has the same name on the inland side of the railroad tracks that is populated primarily by Black people. Went to Cocoa Beach in 1978. It was a sparsely populated, military- driven community, not friendly to Black people at all. So one day I decide to find out where the Black people are. I go to Cocoa. And, sure enough, there’s Black people. It’s a down-on-its-luck kinda town. Not very much affluence but a kind of beach community nonetheless. Well, the interesting thing to me there was that the Black people there almost never looked you in the eye. They were very

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beaten down. They just had accepted a certain station in life for themselves that to me was very, I was annoyed by it. I knew that they didn’t have to behave that way. It was 1973 for God’s sake. People can lift their heads up. You can look White people in the eye. You could say, “yes” or “no” to people based on the merit of what they’re saying not just because a White person says it. Again, I am not being linear but when I went to Cocoa it reminded me of being back in Mississippi and that whole mentality of people who had been depressed for so long that down is up. So, that was one of the things that I saw. Now there were clearly some people there who wanted it to be a different thing. But their struggle was the same struggle that we had as outsiders. Trying to get that critical mass of people who would say “I want things to be different” as opposed to “It’s been like that, it’s gonna be like that. Why buck the system?”

In trying to generate that critical mass, did the church play much of a role in that or was that more…?
The churches were at the center of the activity. The churches, the ministers (not all of them by any stretch of the imagination), were the gathering places where people that had vision and energy to try to do something different. That was where most of it was happening. And, some teachers. Teachers in the Black schools and the segregated schools there who had been exposed to something different. Whether it was going to school in Mississippi at one of the various schools in Mississippi or going to school in let’s say ‘up North’ and coming back and saying, “You know this has gotta change.” There were a lot of people who were principals or teachers and some ministers who had real energy to try to make

those things go. But there were a lot of people who just weren’t able to do that. They just wanted to live to see tomorrow. They didn’t have much in the way of next week or next year. It was just like “can I get through the day so I can be up for it tomorrow.” It was tough. I’d never really seen that before. As I tell people, I grew up in a family that didn’t have any money. I will not say we were poor because I think poor is much more a state of mind than it is an economic reality. We were people who didn’t have money. But my parents had middle class aspirations for both themselves and their children, primarily. We sort of had that middle class notion of deferred gratification. You know, get this education because that’s going to make it better for you tomorrow kind of thing. So they were middle class minded without in fact being middle class. Too many of those people who I met in Mississippi who were not middle class and had no aspirations beyond the immediate survival kind of thing. [They seemed to think] “I’ve have to figure out a way to feed, clothe and house my family and I don’t have time for this theoretical equality thing. I have survival issues to deal with.” And, that fundamentally is a challenge when you confront people in that situation. You’ve got to move them past survival. Most of the stuff that you and I are involved in on a day-to-day basis is a function of a middle class mentality; that is to say, once you move beyond survival you can think about other stuff. But, until you get survival taken care of you can’t think about these other things very effectively. They just don’t register in a way that become action items for you because you have to do food, clothing, shelter. I think oftentimes when we get too far past that we forget that. We forget that when we look back at people we sort of look down

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on them or don’t really appreciate what their plight is. It’s because they are not where we are, not because they’re not smarter or less smart, because they’re not emotionally at a place where they can do the things that we can do. They cannot afford to spend time thinking about what color is my china service is going to be. Because it’s like, (laughing) until I have something to put on the china I don’t need china.

Do you think your training in psychology was helpful to you in that situation? Did you see that from any of your…
I don’t know. I think that maybe what was more useful was my whole experience at Howard. I mean, the Howard experience for me is in a lot of ways similar. I learned a lot about people from other countries that I never knew. I had never really met anybody from another country that I really knew. But at Howard I met people from Africa and the Caribbean. I met people from Kansas that I didn’t know. I didn’t know that any Black people lived in Minneapolis. I met people from Minneapolis. I met people from California. For me it was a real opening experience where I met and learned stuff that I just had no real experience about. Most of what I knew about most things was from television. I saw something on television and I thought that was the real world in a lot of ways. And it’s not. So I think that the experience at Howard, professors teaching different things, learning about Pan-Africanism, learning about Africa. During that time in the early to middle ‘60s many African nations were becoming independent of their European, shrugging off colonialism, or whatever you want to call it. Learning a lot about that and what those struggles were like. So, it sort of widened my

perspective about a lot of things. About people. About how people might be the same and how people are different. Why the struggle of the Ghanaians was real similar to the struggle of Black people in this country. And, why the struggle of any colonialized people is really, there are a lot of analogs. So I think a lot of it had to do with that. And then the energy that young people, students both domestic and international brought to trying to make change. There’s that enthusiasm of youth when you are not smart enough really to know that some of the stuff you want to do you can’t do. But you try anyway. A lot of that was from that experience. Obviously, some of the substantive stuff courses you take, psychology and I took comparative religion courses which I thought were very useful to me because, again it gave me a broader view. I grew up as a Baptist. At one point, my family (my mother’s relatives) thought I was going to be a minister and they were really focusing on this getting me to be a minister thing and I didn’t want to do that. So, I learned a lot about other religions and how they approached the whole God thing and interactions with humans here on the planet. It was a great, great experience for me. That’s what I was saying before about the law school — it was a cocoon — it was an environment that I needed to be in. I was not done certainly by the time I graduated from undergrad. I was not ready to go out into the real world and to confront a lot of issues that I hadn’t had a chance to sort of sort through my own brain. Law school might have been a disaster. I might not have met a guy like Clay Smith who said “Look, this is what you need to do.” He was somebody who looked like me and I sorted of knew intuitively he wanted me to be successful and that’s why he was telling me this. He wasn’t

particularly pleasant to hear but I thought it was coming from a very positive place. I might not have taken that from somebody who meant the exact same thing but who happened not to look like me. I might of said, I’m not doing that.” So, the Howard experience was really, really very important to me and I am eternally grateful for that experience. I think many times that my life would have been a whole different thing had I not had the opportunity to attend Howard University in that window from ’65 to ’72. I think it was very critical for me and shaped a lot of ideas that I sort of later developed more fully. About service. About what my obligation is as a person to the collective group of people, Black and White.

So, all that was going on in my head when I’m down there in Mississippi and that’s part of what drove me to Mississippi. I had to. I mean I couldn’t not get more directly involved. Law school was “Okay this is why I’m doing this.” So I had to go. And, my good friend Gil Ray who did not go said, “You are out of your mind.” Gil was probably right but I had to go. I had a good experience with that. So, then I left that and came back and threw myself back into school trying to catch up. They started these crazy interviews to law firms because by then the law firms, guilt or whatever, they discovered that Howard Law School was the place to hire Black lawyers so they would come and recruit. Because I was the managing editor of the law review, I looked like a likely candidate for a lot of them. So, I got a chance to go to New York for a couple of interviews. I got to go to Chicago, Jenner and Block flew me out there to get a couple of interviews. So I got to go to some different cities for a change. I think I went to Detroit,

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Chicago and New York for interviews. And then I interviewed with a couple of firms here. And, ultimately decided not to go to work for any of them. I went to work that summer for the U.S. Attorneys Office. (Laughs)
And where was that?

Here in D.C.
Here in D.C.
Yeah that was fun.
It’s so interesting that you were down in Greenwood Mississippi in the Delta doing all that work and then you come back and you’re flying to Jenner and Block for interviews in New York and these corporate firms, and you know, even the Attorney General’s Office in D.C. How was the world any different for you when you came back from Mississippi? Maybe another way to ask the question is, how were you different after coming back from Mississippi? Or, were you? What I knew when I left Mississippi was that I wanted to be a litigator. I was absolutely convinced that I wanted to be a litigator. Because I had to be in a courtroom trying to get things straightened out. So the idea of talking to these law firms was “maybe I could learn to be a litigator there.” I would up working at the U.S. Attorneys Office because I realized that was the quickest path to a courtroom on my own. I realized that in the big corporate law firms they had litigation, but young lawyers like myself never actually wound up in court. We’re over here doing all this scut work and you never actually wound up in a courtroom, except maybe to bring something to the lawyer, the partner who was trying it because he saying “I forgot it can you go get it, take it down there to him.”

Mr. Cooke:

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(Laughs) Yeah.
So Mississippi said to me “I want to be a litigator. I want to go to court and punch their lights out.” So I came back and I interviewed with those law firms. Now, interviewing with law firms was a kind of a bifurcated decision. They were all chasing the same two or three guys in class. Okay, and I was under some pressure, internal mostly, to make sure that the law school had a relatively good showing. That people who could walk and talk and chew gum at the same time actually got interviewed. So I went sort of out of a sense of loyalty that “Okay, I had this good GPA, I was the managing editor so maybe I ought to go.” But also, I was trying to figure out what is it you guys really do. There were sort of two purposes. But at the end of the day, from talking to people like Luke Moore (who ultimately became a judge here and died not too long ago), Bill Bryant (who is a federal judge here).
Were these your teachers?
They taught me trial practice. Teachers. And some of the other professors who were also litigators. I just figured out that I think the quickest way to a courtroom for me is to be an Assistant United States Attorney and get to court and get a lot of trial experience. Also I had sort of become convinced that there were huge numbers of Black people in the criminal justice system being prosecuted and there were very few Black prosecutors. So I figured this was a way I could make some difference there too. This is all part of a larger strategy to get out of the Air Force because at this point in law school I have a commission in the United States Air Force. I have what is called an educational deferment which means I don’t have

Mr. Kempf: Mr. Cooke:

to go to Air Force except to now and then put on my uniform. But, mostly, I’m not in the Air Force, but at the end of law school I’m going to have to go in the Air Force, arguably, to be a lawyer but there was no guarantee. Their idea was, see because they told me that with this degree in psychology I could be a transportation officer or mortuary officer. And, I didn’t want to do that. So, I said “Well, I’ll go to law school.” They said “Okay you can go to law school but we can’t guarantee you you’ll be a lawyer.” I said, “Well, you know, I’ll take my chances. I figure if I got a law degree it’s going to be tough for you guys to say no.” My strategy was maybe I could figure out a way to, if I get a job in the U.S. Attorneys Office, maybe I could trade government service for government service and not go on active duty. So, that was all part of my thinking. That’s part of the reason why I wound up in the U.S. Attorneys Office that summer between my second and third year. I enjoyed that. I worked in the appellate division. I worked in the grand jury intake and I worked for a felony division prosecutor. A guy named Bob Shuker who also became a judge and a friend, trying a case and working as a sort of paralegal, a glorified paralegal for him in this big case he was trying. I liked that. I said “This is good. This is what I want to do.” So, I was going to be an Assistant U.S. Attorney and did get a job offer to be an assistant U.S. attorney by the time I graduated from law school but the Air Force was not real keen on that. What I did was, after I finished the law clerk or whatever they call it (summer thing at the U.S. Attorney’s Office), I came back to law school and I was trying to figure out what to do. I was working on the law journal and the National Conference and all that kind of crazy stuff. The Vice Dean came to

me one day and said “Look I need you to go talk to a guy who is going to be a judge on the D.C. Superior Court. He needs a law clerk and wants to get somebody who graduated from Howard and he wants to get a Howard law student to be his law clerk. He wants to interview somebody to be a law clerk. And, I think clerkship’s a good thing.” So I’m thinking “Well, yeah okay, maybe I should clerk for a year.” You know after I get out of law school. Get some more figuring out what’s going on in the courtroom kind of experience. So I agree to meet with Judge Draper. This is really like November or December. So, I meet with him, who was at that time not Judge Draper but was about to be Judge Draper. Nice guy who had graduated from the law school class of ’47 or ’48, had been general counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, was a good personal friend of then Senator Thomas Eagleton who was the force behind him getting nominated to be a judge in the Superior Court. So he says “I think I am going to be nominated shortly. I think I am going to be sworn in shortly after that. I need a clerk. I want to hit the ground running, and I want to talk with people now.” I go “Well, you know I graduate in June and I’ll take the bar in July so I am ready to get going in August.” He said, “No, no, no. I want you to get going in January.” I thought “January…I’m still in school.” He says “Bah, go work it out.” So I go work it out. He interviews a couple more people and says “Look I want you to do it. I think you’re the best guy.” So I agree to do it. So my senior year I am law clerking. I got the National Council of Law Reviews, managing editor of the law journal and I’m law clerking. I am just like crazy.

Mr. Kempf: Wow.

Mr. Cooke:

I am having this insane life and, but a lot of fun. Because the judge is one of those guys who believes that the clerk ought to be in court with him. So, I’m in court with the judge. I am sitting there in the witness chair sometimes or sometimes in the other chair and seeing what’s going on. He’s critiquing lawyers after court and I am learning a lot. He is a very, very good guy. So I graduate in June.
And the year again?
’72. I began in January ’72, probably the middle of it, and graduated in June 1972 and he asked me to stay for the next year. I said “Cool.” I’m having a great time so I stay until the following June.
You clerked in that court for 18 months?
18 months. In that 18 months, I see the guys at the U.S. Attorneys Office and some others. And, that’s when they offered me a job. They say, “When you finish your clerkship, we want you to come to the office and be an assistant U.S. attorney.” I go, “Great this is wonderful.” And, the judge, I am sure, put in a good word for me so it all works out. In the course of the year I was clerking for the judge I try to resign my commission. I say to the Air Force “Eh, thanks but I don’t really need this.” And the Air Force says “No you can’t resign, please see the contract you signed.” I go “But guys I got stuff to do” and they go “Oh, no, no, no.” So, the last time I try to resign the Air Force (Laughs) never send me a letter [reply letter] back, they just put my letter back in an envelope and send my letter back (laughing). So, I sort of get the message that they are not going to let me resign. I am sort of telling the guys at the U.S. Attorneys Office I really don’t

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think I can get out of this, but they say they’re going to try to get me out through whatever influence they can through the Department of Justice. Now, meanwhile, my dad has for years worked for the Department of the Navy, for the Navy Judge Advocate General. I know this but I don’t really know this. So, one day I’m talking to my dad about this Air Force thing and how I really want to be an assistant U.S. attorney and I have to get out of this. So, he says “well, maybe I can talk to Admiral Starling.” I go “Admiral Starling?” He says “He’s the Navy Judge Advocate General, maybe you should meet with him.”

Do you know Starling’s first name?
Marlon or Merlin, I forget…Marlon or Merlin Starling. He said “You need to meet with him. Maybe he could figure out a way for you to go into the Navy Reserve and you don’t have to go on active duty. You could be in the Navy Reserve office.” And, I go “Yeah, that’s cool.” So he arranges a lunch for me with Admiral Starling and some Navy captain. We had a great lunch. Starling is wonderful and he says “You know you got this military commitment.” I go “Yeah yeah yeah blah blah blah.” He says, “Okay I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Why don’t you apply for an InterService Transfer. Transfer from the Air Force to the Navy. And we will work out an assignment for you that you really like. Or, we’ll get you in the Navy Reserve.” I say “Cool.” You know, I have this obligation and I don’t care whether it’s the Army, whether it’s the Navy or Air Force really. Mind you, the Air Force has not told me yet that I’m going to be a lawyer there. They had told me that they want me in the Air Force and sort of intimated that I would be in the JAG but they hadn’t really put me in the JAG department.

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Now, is all of this happening as you’re finishing your clerkship?
Oh yeah, well yeah. This is really happening in the spring of ’73. So I meet with Admiral Starling and he’s really pretty cool. I am coming back from the meeting and I tell my dad “I’m feeling pretty pretty chipper. I think this is going to work out. Either I’ll get to go to a really cool place or I’ll be in the Navy Reserve.” Now, you have to remember that the Navy at that point had about 750-880 active duty Navy lawyers. Three of them were Black. They were having all these racial incidents on these ships and naval stations so they needed Black lawyers big time. So, that’s why Starling really wanted me. And that was okay. I mean, I was cool with that. So, a couple of weeks to a month later I get a phone call from the Air Force Judge Advocate General’s Office. A guy named Cheney, General Cheney, but he had some colonel actually call me. The colonel says “The General wants to meet with you.” I go “Okay.” So I meet with the General and this colonel guy and they said “Look, you had lunch with my good friend Marlon. I said “Yeah, he’s a great guy.” He says “Marlon tells me you want to transfer to the Navy.” I said “Yeah, yeah, you know seems like a good thing to do.” He says “Well Lieutenant, I’m going to tell you what I told Marlon. Marlon if you want a Black JAG you have to grow your own. This one belongs to me.” (Laughter) I say, “What?!” He said “Lieutenant you aren’t going anywhere. You’re going to be an Air Force Judge Advocate.” I go, “Well, I have plans.” So he says “Look as an accommodation, I know Admiral Starling made you some kind of deal, what do want from us? Where can we send you where you will be happy?” Now the Air Force had 1200-1300 JAGs, 25 of whom are Black. Okay, so he needs me too.

So he’s like “Where do you want to go?” I go “Well, I don’t know.” At that point the really weird thing was that my mother was sick. She was dying of cancer (although we did not know that at the time). So, I say to the General. I’d like to be some place where I can, you know in the area, so that I can get back home quick. I tell him at first that I don’t want to go someplace where it’s cold. I don’t want to go to Minnesota. I don’t want to go to South Dakota. I don’t want to go to Utah. I don’t want to go to those places. He says, “Well, okay.” So, he tells me that I can go to Cocoa Beach, Florida because it is in the Air Force Systems Command which is the same command that Andrews Air Force Base is in and they have planes going back and forth all the time. So, I could come home on an Air Force flight almost any time. I said, “Cool.” He says, “That’s what we’ll do.” But then he says, “But first you have to get into the JAG program.” I said “I thought I was in the JAG program.” He says, “No, no, no. When you get in this is what’s going to happen (but you’ve got to get in first).” I say “What does that mean?” He says, “Well you have to have some interviews.” So I realize, I say “Well, if I don’t pass the interviews they’re going to put me out.” They tell me I have to go see a guy at Bolling Air Force Base out in Southeast Washington. So, I go see this Major and I tell the Major (I go out and I have a big Afro and wearing a dashiki) and I am like real militant. So, I’m hoping that the Major will say “I can’t have this guy here. He’s like too radical.” And, the Major does. The Major says “Ughhh, reject him, reject him, reject him.” So the Major writes that up and when he does that that causes me to have a second interview with a full colonel at Andrews Air Force Base, so I go out there. And, the colonel

Mr. Kempf: Mr. Cooke:

tells me about the interview report that the Major wrote. He said “The Major didn’t recommend you. The Major thought that you were too rough. But you know what I think? I think it is all a sham.” (Laughs) “I think you want us to put you out. And you know what, I’m not going to let that happen. I am recommending you for assignment to the Judge Advocate General’s department.” I go, “Okay.” (Laughter) So, anyway, he recommends me and that’s how I get in. And, then the General honors his promise and I get sent to Cocoa Beach, Florida. When were you sent to Cocoa Beach Florida?

June 1973. June 28, 1973. I am told to report. So I drive down to Cocoa Beach and show up and report to my duty station for four years. They keep me there for all four years. I am literally in the Air Force four years to the day from the day I show up. Other people I knew had gotten out early. The war in Vietnam had wound down, they needed fewer people especially lawyers, they were letting people go. They would never let me go. And that was sort of okay because I was really having a good time. I had a great time in the Air Force, but they would never let me out despite my requests. So I stayed there literally four years to the day and drove back from Florida. I had a great time in the Air Force. I traveled around the country a fair amount. I tried a lot of cases. I worked on the space program. I worked with spies. I did a lot of stuff.

Are there maybe a couple, are there any cases you worked on or experiences in particular that are noteworthy?
Not noteworthy in the grand sense. I tried a lot of cases with guys charged with criminal offenses and got some off. Got some acquitted. The military justice

Mr. Kempf:

Mr. Cooke:

system, at that point, was really pretty unfair to the accused. That is because it was a military operation, it was all integrated and that is to say that convening authority (the person that convened the court martial) also supervised the people who were defending it. They supervised the people that were prosecuting. They chose the jury. I thought that was really, really unfair. If you had career aspirations, then obviously, you didn’t want to make the convening authority unhappy so your ability to defend someone he had decided was under criminal defense was hampered. About halfway through the time I was in the Air Force they changed that and created a separate command structure for the defense team. And, that was a good first step. But I remember when I was Chief of Military Justice at my base, going to the Post Commander who was the convening authority; well, I would go to the Commanding General who is a Major General for general court marshals and for the board of officers who would be there. We had a big computer printout of all the colonels, lieutenant colonels, majors, captains, first and second lieutenants that he could choose from. He would say “Which ones are going to vote to convict them? I want those. I don’t want the ones who are going to let’em go.” So it really had a lot of problems. A lot of them had been worked out. But I’ve learned from people that I have talked to since. But it was very tough [Tape 2 ends here].

TAPE #3 – SIDE A
Mr. Kempf: OK, I want to go back and ask a little bit more about your childhood. You

mentioned a little bit earlier that you were raised Baptist. 67

Mr. Cooke: Mr. Kempf:

Mr. Cooke:

Yes.
Would you talk for a few minutes about the role of the church when you were a child and today if you’d like?
Sure. It was a Baptist church. It was almost Pentecostal. I guess a number of my relatives on my mother’s side certainly are more accurately described as Pentecostal as opposed to Baptist — started off Baptist and became Pentecostal, I guess. At a point when I used to go to visit my relatives in North Carolina as a kid, up until the time I was about 12-14 years old, part of the summer experience was to go to vacation Bible School (and obviously church on Sundays and Wednesdays) which is a part of the routine. Out of that activity came the idea on the part of some of my relatives that I was destined to be a preacher. Partly, because I think I had pretty good memory and I could memorize the books of the Bible and the different things I had read from vacation Bible School and church. They thought that that was indicative of my destiny to be a minister and they were really pushing me in that direction. I did not feel that I was called, or that was where I wanted to go. But, I was only 12 or less at that point in time and I was really more under their influence than I might otherwise have been. Ultimately, that all broke down by the time I was 12 or 14 someplace in there. When I just complained to my mother that I didn’t really want to do this, that they were making me do something I just didn’t want to do. While church was great and God I believed in and everything I didn’t feel like that was my place, my destiny. So my mother, to her credit, said to them, “Leave him alone, let him go.” So,

they stopped pushing me and I didn’t have to do that anymore. By the time I was 14, I was working in a little neighborhood grocery store to make spending money. Sometimes, certainly during the school year, I worked on Sunday because the store was open on Sunday and that was the day that I wasn’t at school or otherwise pretty much occupied. I would try to convince my mother that I didn’t need to go to church that day or didn’t need to take my brothers and sisters to Sunday School before church and needed to work because I was making money doing stuff. My mother who was a lot more progressive than you might have predicted given where she grew up and her education, she was very indulgent is a better word. She said, “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to but you need to go to church.” So, we wound up with a sort of compromise where I would go to church some days and some Sundays I would work on the store on weekends. Slowly but surely that resulted in my not attending church with any significant frequency with my brothers and sisters and my mother. My father hardly ever went to church. That frequency broke up and by the time I got to college I really wasn’t going to church much at all. Every once in a while maybe out of a year maybe three times, it was very, very rare that I would go to church. But, that led me to sort of look at religion, compare the religions (took some courses). I spent some time thinking about converting to Catholicism, spent a lot more time thinking about converting to Islam; but ultimately decided not to convert to any of those and just would sort of not go to church. Although I knew a lot of ministers, that was the interesting thing. In some of the work that I did I would frequently meet ministers. That was one of the reasons that church sort of didn’t work for

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me. Because I knew a lot of these ministers maybe in ways they didn’t want me to know them. I sort of lost some of the respect I had for organized religion. I sort of like to refer to myself as more spiritual than religious. I think that the time I spent studying Eastern religion or Eastern philosophy and Islam helped me think through the God thing a little bit better for my own personal purposes. So that’s where I sort of wound up being spiritual as opposed to a particular denomination or religion, although I have a lot of relatives who are Pentecostal and very fervent believers in the literal biblical teachings.

But you said your father wasn’t a churchgoer. No, no not at all.
What was his…?
He was Baptist too.

Did he speak of religion or did he keep pretty tight-lipped about it?
Not much. He was pretty tight-lipped about it. He told us to go to church. It wasn’t just our mother telling us to go. His instructions were we were “going to church with our mother.” He was working. See, that was one of the other things. My father in addition to working as a mail clerk for the Navy Department almost all of his government service of 40 odd years, 46 I think when he retired, he also drove a cab here in the city.
On weekends?
Even on weekends. All the time. See, one of the truly odd things about my father and the relationship that he and his children had is often times we would not see my father from Sunday after dinner until the following Saturday morning. He

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Mr. Kempf:

would be up and on his way to work before I got up, and he would come home after I got to bed from driving his cab. So, even though he lived in the house and he would leave these notes, I wouldn’t physically see him sometimes from Sunday after dinner until Saturday morning of that week when he didn’t go to work early (at the government). And, he would get up and start driving his cab at sort of a normal time of 9:00 or 10:00 and I would be up and I would see him. I would see him Saturday morning before he left to drive the cab, he would come back Saturday evening or night. We would see him Saturday for dinner sometimes, most times. We would see him Sunday morning, and we would see him Sunday after dinner and we wouldn’t see him again for the rest of the week. In retrospect it was odd, but we did not think so at the time. On Sunday, he would go drive his cab, but sometimes he would come back to the house to hang out with us, or take us places. But, mostly, his excuse for not going to church was that he was working. So he would take people to church, or wherever, but he wasn’t going to church himself.

Sounds like you. (Laughter)
(Laughter) That’s right. So I am my father’s son in that regard.
That’s right.
So that’s why it sort of seemed like ‘yeah, that’s a good story to tell.’ So he told us to go to church. He said, “That’s where you need to go” and “You need to do that.” One of his brothers is a very religious guy. In fact, he is a deacon and a lay minister in his church.
And he’s still living?

Mr. Cooke: passed on. Mr. Kempf: Mr. Cooke: Mr. Kempf: Mr. Cook: Mr. Kempf: Mr. Cooke:

Mr. Kempf:

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Yes. All my father’s brothers and sisters are still alive. He is the only one who’s

I’m sorry. Is your mother deceased?
Yes, she is deceased.
Your mother died in?
1974 and my father died in 1999.
Will you state their names again please?
My mother’s name was Annie Leon Ellis Cooke. My father’s name was Frederick Douglas Cooke, Sr.

I want to ask you a few questions about your interests as a child. One question, what were your interests as a child, outside of school?
I liked school a lot. I used to read all kinds of stuff.
What did you like to read?

Oh, everything, I read everything. I would literally read dictionaries and encyclopedias. I would just read them from cover to cover. Not for a course, or to get some school credit. I would just read them. I just thought it was great. Lots of stuff in there. But, I liked to play baseball. I was a pretty good pitcher, but I couldn’t hit. I didn’t realize why I couldn’t hit until I was in about the 8th grade. I realized the reason I couldn’t hit was because I couldn’t see the ball. I didn’t realize I couldn’t see the ball. I could see well enough to read. But my vision had already started to get bad. It used to always amaze me how other kids could hit the ball. Because I really never knew where the ball was. I was always guessing, literally guessing. I realized after a while, after I got glasses that you

Mr. Kempf:

could actually see the ball. (Laughs) And that would help you hit it. But I couldn’t hit, and I didn’t know why. I could pitch because I could see well enough to see the strike zone and I could put the ball there. So, I was a pitcher and I played infield. I was a defensive ball player. I had no ability to hit. So I did that.

I played a little basketball and I really wasn’t very good at basketball. I felt like I was short but I could jump. I could dunk a ball when I was 5’10”. By the time I was in the 11th or 12th grade I could dunk a ball but I had no real basketball skills. I would play with guys, but they would choose me to play as a last resort.
I was like the last guy chosen. I would hang out with guys who really could play basketball. I had some friends who were again mostly older than I was at the time, a year or two or three. They were some really good basketball players. I would go and hang out with them. I would watch their watches and their coats while they played basketball because they wouldn’t let me on the court with them too often. I learned a lot, but I didn’t play. When I was in the Air Force, I was the coach of the base team. I learned a fair amount about basketball because I had coached for 3 out of 4 years that I was in the Air Force.

And I liked music. I played trumpet. I played electric bass. I played at keyboards but not very much or very well. I was in a little band for a while, but was not very good so I didn’t stay in the band long. But, I liked music. My father was very fond of music and I attribute a lot of my interest in music to him because when he was at home he played music a lot.
What did he play?

Mr. Cooke:

Mostly jazz. He liked jazz and I really got into that. At the time, I didn’t think I was. I used to say, “I hate that. Why are you playing that?” I wanted to listen to contemporary music of my time, whether it was James Brown or the Temptations or whatever, Motown. He was like, “Yeah that’s okay but this is better.” He would force us to listen to his music. He built a stereo — Hi-Fi system is what they used to call them in the old days. A lot of it was stuff he sort of built, and so he wouldn’t let us touch it. Who knows why? It was his system, and he played what he wanted to play and you listened to it and that was just the name of that song. So we listened to it a lot. I used to go, “I can’t wait ‘til I get old enough to listen to my own music.” Eventually, I had a little tabletop radio in my room that I could play music that I wanted to hear in my room. But, in the house it was his system. Being my father’s son, when I got to be older that’s what I did to my daughters — I made them listen to my music. (Laughs) I had this great stereo system that I wouldn’t let them touch and I played the music. Except they touched it. See, they were not intimidated as I was. I believed my father would have physically harmed me had I touched his stereo system. I would never touch it. My daughters didn’t believe that I would physically harm them so they would touch my stereo system whenever they felt like it. So, when I would come home they would have played all sorts of music. I would ask them, “How did this get on here?” They would respond that they did not know I knew that it had been one of them, but they were not intimidated as I had been, which was a good thing.

Did you ever go listen to live music in DC when you were young?

Mr. Kempf:

Mr. Cooke:

Oh sure. When I was an older teenager and in college I used to go to the Howard Theater and listen to music, contemporary music mostly James Brown, Motown, and other R&B acts. The Cellar Door used to be a place here in town that played music when I was in college. Blues Alley, Mr. Henry’s, the Bohemian Caverns and places like that would have live music. I would go to those places and hear live music. The Carter Barron Amphitheater in the summertime, outdoor kind of concerts.
Where is that?
It’s up 16th & Kennedy Streets NW Washington. They have outdoor concerts in the summertime. Most of them are free. Some of them you pay a small amount, but I sometimes went there. You could hear opera there. I played classical trumpet so I used to listen to a lot of classical music which is I enjoyed. I used to play classical trumpet. When I learned how to play, I was not taught popular music. I was taught classical trumpet. I played popular music because that what I felt more comfortable with. But, I was taught to be a classical trumpet player. Was that by choice?
No.
Did your parents force you to take lessons?
Yes. They told me that I was going to take lessons. I told them I wanted to play the trumpet. They said “Great.” My teacher (and the teacher was really through the public school system) taught classical trumpet. My parents bought me a trumpet and I practiced and played classical trumpet. I used to try to play jazz kind of pieces. My father would play Buck Clayton, and I learned to play some of

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the parts of Buck Clayton’s LPs by ear because my father would play them. I had a good enough ear that I could hear the notes and I would try to imitate it on my trumpet and I could play that. That was great, that was fun. One of the best parts of playing trumpet was to be able to get to the point where one, I could read music – that was great; but, then to be able to play by ear – to hear it and know what note it was and then be able to replicate it, that was a lot of fun. I did that for a while. But, as it turned out I really wasn’t that good of a trumpet player so I stopped by the time I was about 15 or so. I played trumpet from the time I was in about the 4th or 5th grade to about 10th grade and I didn’t play anymore. I didn’t play anything anymore except piano that I picked up from just hanging around people who played music. I could play a little bit. We didn’t have a piano in the house so when I would see a piano I would just try to play. Then I became a much more avid listener and went to hear music and enjoy music as a fan.

Did your mother work outside the home when you were a child?
Intermittently. Mostly, she worked in the home. Periodically, she would work outside the home as a domestic for different people. I remember she did that for a few years. I don’t think she really (clearly they could have used the money) but I don’t think she saw herself as anything other than a homemaker. She was very concerned with what was going on with her children and whether they were okay. Whether they were okay physically and in terms of getting school work done. So she really didn’t like being away from home. She wanted to be there when we came home. She was sort of like the neighborhood mom. All the kids in the neighborhood came to our house because my mom was just very welcoming to

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them. She didn’t have a lot of rules that you couldn’t violate. So you could come and hang out.
(interjecting) Right, unnecessary rules.
That’s right. So she was very welcoming to the kids. She was the kind of person that all the kids called her “Mom.” That was just what she liked to do. She was very good at it. She did work outside the home for infrequent periods of times, I recall, she worked outside of the home like I said as a domestic because she didn’t have any other skills. Some of her sisters, my aunts, came from that little town in North Carolina, came to Washington to live.

Were you generally healthy growing up? Did you have any illnesses or anything out of the ordinary, not in good health?
No. I had the luck of good health. I used to injure myself as a kid — broke a finger stuff like that, stabbed myself in my hand (the umbrella was broken and one of the sprockets did that) but mostly I was perfectly healthy.

Okay. Well, I wanted to return now to your time in the Air Force. If we could start with you telling us what your ranks were that would be good for the record. Sure. I was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant in the Air Force in June 1969 when I got my bachelor’s degree. Then I got the educational deferment and after about two years they told me that I had been promoted to 1st Lieutenant. And, then two years later when I went on active duty in the Judge Advocate General Department I was promoted to captain. I was a captain for four years until I got out of the Air Force in June of 1977. But just before I got out, they were trying to convince me

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to stay in and they were going to promote me to major if I agreed to stay. And I told them “No.” I was leaving so I didn’t get that promotion (Laughs).
Nice try.
That’s right. Nice try. I told them, I said “look, if you promote me to colonel I’ll stay but otherwise I’m out of here.” (Laughter)

So you were stationed in Cocoa Beach all four years?
Yes I was stationed at Patrick Air Force Base in Cocoa Beach, Florida from June ’73 to June ’77. I was stationed there permanently, although I was sent temporarily to a number of different places around the country and to the Bahamas. (Laughs)
(Laughs) Awful place to be. Would you say that’s where you learned how the nuts and bolts of being a lawyer?
No. I think I learned the nuts and bolts of being a lawyer from Judge Draper (?) when I was clerking. I think the good thing about the Air Force was that it was the first opportunity I had to be on my own as a lawyer and to make some of that stuff that Judge Draper taught me work. As I tell people, young people in law school especially, the military can be a good experience for you, but the thing you’ve got to remember is first and foremost that you’re an officer in the United States Air Force or military and you happen to be a lawyer. Because of that the institutional mentality is that when you become a captain you are assumed to have certain capabilities. The Air Force assumes that you can do certain things. As a captain, the Air Force turns you loose to do your job. They tell you that this is your job, do it. Your career rises or falls based on your ability to get the job done.

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That was a very scary, but also a very good growth experience because you don’t get hand held a lot, you get to do it. So, when it’s your case to try, it’s your case to try and you try it. And, when it’s your legal matter to resolve, it’s your legal matter to resolve and that’s just the name of that song. It was pretty cool. I got a chance to be on my own and to figure out whether stuff I learned or thought that I had I learned worked or not. That was the good part of it. The bad part of it, obviously, is that you could get yourself into some trouble and develop some bad habits because there was not a lot of close supervision. If you wind up doing something pretty screwy, and keep doing it that way and you sort of get away with it, you develop that bad habit too. But, I had some pretty good people around me who were willing to tell me when I was outside the lines and tried to reel me in. I enjoyed the Air Force. I thought it was a good experience. I was surprised, but I enjoyed it.

So you left the Air Force in 1977?
Yeah. In June 1977.
What next?
I had been doing a lot of different things in the Air Force. I had been in the Air Force for a total of eight years at that point. It really was a decision point for me because the Air Force wanted to send me to Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany. They were going to promote me to major and I had to agree to go to Ramstein for four years. And, if I agreed to go to Ramstein for four years they would promote me to major, as they call it “below the zone.” Typically, I wouldn’t have been eligible for promotion to major until the next year. But, they

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were going to promote me to major, send me to Ramstein and I would then come back from Ramstein four years later as a major. And, maybe if I did well, eligible to be promoted to lieutenant colonel. At that point, I would have been 12 years in the Air Force and at that point it would have made little sense to get out because I was more than half way to 20 years, and why flush 12 years down the drain if you’ve only got 8 years left to make 20 and get your pension. So, I declined the offer to go to Ramstein because I don’t think I wanted to stay in the Air Force for 20 years. I really had mixed feelings about that decision because when I first went in all I wanted was out. Literally, you could wake me up at 3:30 in the morning and ask me how many days I had left in the Air Force and I could tell you with absolute certainty. I was counting the days from the day I got in, I knew how many days I had left to do. But, I enjoyed it, and I was surprised that I enjoyed it.

I got out and when I was in law school one of the jobs I had was working for this law firm called Dow Lohnes and Albertson (unintelligible Tape #3 Side A @339) as a law clerk.
I’m sorry could you repeat the name?

Dow Lohnes and Albertson. I worked there because the guy who was of in charge of the law clerk program at the time, a guy named Daniel Toohey, believed that the firm ought to recruit from all the law schools in the city. He sort of insisted that each school have at least one of the clerkships. So I got the Howard seat from a guy who had graduated. For me the firm, that job at the law firm was really just a way to pay the rent and other expenses. I had no real sense of any

future there. I did a pretty good job, I guess. When I was clerking for Judge Draper, I stayed in contact with the guys at the firm, and I would see them in court or just around. When I was in the Air Force, I stayed in contact with Dan Toohey. So, when it became apparent that I was leaving the Air Force Dan Toohey asked if I would consider working for the firm.” I said, “Okay, I don’t have a job.” I hadn’t really thought about it, and this was like within the last year or 9 months of my time in the Air Force. I came back here, home. Within a week to 10 days I started working at the law firm. The day I show up, I am asked what department I wanted to work in They knew I had been a litigator most of the time that I was in the Air Force. They asked if I wanted to be a litigator, or go into our litigation section. I said “No, I think I’ve done enough litigation for now and I would like to learn something different.” I was asked about my interest in telecommunications, and what I knew about that. I told Dan that I own a radio and a television, and was that good enough. (Laughter) So that is how I became a telecommunications lawyer.

I began to do telecommunications work, intellectual property work, and higher education work because those things all tied together because a lot of our telecommunications clients had intellectual property issues as a part of developing programming. A number of our clients who owned radio/TV stations were educational institutions so they sort of all fit together a little bit. So, I began to do that kind of stuff and that was a lot of fun. Just coincidentally, when I arrived at the firm that fall the Commission (FCC) released its Minority Ownership Task Force Report that talked about how the FCC would institute

policies to increase the number of minority-owned radio and TV stations across the United States. The reason that was good luck was because among the various policies that the FCC launched was a program called “distress sales” for radio and TV station licensees, who got in trouble with the FCC for rules violations and were in jeopardy of losing their licenses or having them revoked. If the license was revoked, the licensee’s entire investment would be lost. Such licensees could, instead of going through a process that could result in a license revocation, could agree to transfer the license to a minority owner for 75%of the fair market value of their station. Basically, you were being fined 25% of the value of your station, but you got to get that 75% as opposed to zero. Some of our clients would get in trouble from time-to-time. There was just a certain percentage that would do that. They would then start looking for somebody to buy their station under the distress sale program who was a racial or ethnic minority. Being a racial and ethnic minority [myself] and knowing some minority people who were interested in the telecommunications business created an opportunity for me to connect some of my firm clients with the new clients who were Black., We did a number of those distress sales in the late 70’s (’78, ’79,’80). It was great fun because I was doing more than regulatory work. I was also doing transactional work with the buying and selling piece and the M&A work. So, it was a lot of fun. We did a couple of those and more, as it turned out later on — until the policy went away. That was the Reagan Administration, I think, that killed all that. But, until then it was a great ride. So I did that and like I said a number of colleges owned radio and TV stations around the country. In 1978 or ’79 the

Copyright Revision Act of 1976 went into effect and it changed the copyright law of the United States that had previously existed. That launched me into another area of specialty where I went around the country giving lectures talking about what the new copyright law meant to, in this case, schools and colleges and Universities. There was a huge problem in the previous copyright law where schools and colleges and university professors were photocopying huge quantities of material from copyrighted books and providing as handouts for classes and the authors would get nothing for this. The professor shows up and says, “Okay, this is the textbook and these are the additional readings.” And, a stack of additional readings this high and they’re all chapters out of different books. The copyright holder’s getting bubkes for this, and this is going on in the academic environment. Copyright holders knew it was happening, and couldn’t stop it. The Copyright Revision Act was designed correct that, to make the professors behave, and to give the Universities some affirmative obligation to prohibit it so that these copyright holders could be paid for their works that were being used. We traveled around giving lectures about that, and colleges and universities could implement compliance programs. That was quite interesting, for me at least. We did other stuff for higher education issues generally. The federal government had a large program for providing some funding for colleges and universities to fund their telecommunications programs infrastructure for distance learning via television. The federal government would allow you to put in proposals for grants to get funding for various facilities that would allow that to happen. We shepherded a lot of those facilities’ grant applications through the Corporation for Public

Mr. Kempf: particular. Mr. Cooke:

Broadcasting and the National Telecommunications Information Administration that were responsible for these grants. Again, that was interesting. I did that from basically ’78 to ’87.
Were there a few people who you worked with a lot? If you could go in

Yeah. The guy I worked with mostly was a guy named Daniel Toohey who was at Dow Lohnes who was older than me and was a partner already and was my mentor. A guy named Lenny Baxt who is still at the firm. Lenny and I were associates who came in the same year. I worked with Lenny a lot. Bill Perry who was there and, again was a partner, was kind of a mentor to me. The firm was founded in 1917. And, when I was hired in 1977 I was the first Black lawyer they had ever hired. In 1982 I was the first Black partner they ever had.

It was a good bunch of guys. We got along. I enjoyed going to work every day, and I enjoyed the people and the work I did. It was a lot of fun. It was just a little odd environment. It was kind of schizophrenic. I used to tell people all the time that because I was the only Black lawyer in the firm in a city that was predominantly Black, and when I went home most of my friends were not White. So, the only time I saw White people was at work. (Laughter). This was like really weird. It was kinda schizoid, not in a negative way. It was always sort of like ‘Why is this?”

How old were you in 1978 when you started there? 31.
You were born ’49?

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I was born in ’47 so it’s got to be 30.
You know, I don’t think I asked your birth date.
May 26th. This Saturday.
This Saturday?
Yeah.
1947.
‘47. Yeah so I was 30.
So you were 31 when you started?
Yeah, yeah, I had just turned 30 because I started in July. So I was 30 and I did that and I had a great time. The firm was very supportive of all kinds of civil rights stuff and of things I did, I met lots of people. I had met before I started with the firm, before I even went in the Air Force, I had met and become a friend of Jesse Jackson. Jesse is a good friend of mine.
How did you meet Jesse Jackson? Do you remember?
Just doing crazy civil rights stuff. Just doing crazy stuff and met the Reverend who became a client and to this day is a client. A very complex guy, but a client and a good friend. I met a lot of people like that. Percy Sutton, in New York, became a client when I was at the firm and I helped Mr. Sutton in some of his cable television endeavors. We pursued a cable television franchise in Detroit, Chicago, Queens NY and Washington DC. We only won in one place and that was in Queens. Although, we won here but we got hosed here. Politics got us. We lost in Chicago. We probably should have won in Detroit, but we came up short.

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Could you elaborate a little bit on this pursuit?
On the pursuit of cable television?
Cable television franchises, yes.
In the early ‘80s cable television came to urban America in ways it had never come before. It had been a rural experience because that was the only way people in rural America could get television was through community antenna television. You put up a big antenna, you get the signals, you run it through a wire into your house because your TV antenna on your roof won’t get it for you. Then, the cable companies once they sort of got rural, suburban America under control decided that the real numbers, the real market was in the cities. And, most cities didn’t have cable. They began in earnest to try to convince city officials to award cable franchises in urban areas. That just turned into a frenzy.

My law firm represented a number of cable television operators, what used to be called ‘multiple system operators’ (large cable companies). Cox Cable out of Atlanta being one of them and there were others. I worked very closely with Cox Cable for a while. We were buying and selling cable systems all across America. One of the ideas was to consolidate. Instead of having a bunch of franchises all over the place, to try to consolidate as much as you could around one location and realize certain economies of scale and have a better operation. We were selling here and buying there all over the place. That was a lot of fun. I, traveled all around the country doing that and really freaking people out because they never saw Black lawyers who would show up for these things. They would be like “you can’t be the lawyer for Cox” [and, I would respond] “yes I am.”

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When I was in the Air Force, one time, this master sergeant who was a career guy, 30 years’ service in the Air Force aircraft maintenance squadron. He was the first sergeant and from some place in the South, I don’t remember [exactly] now. I had been talking to his boss who was a lieutenant colonel and commander of the aircraft maintenance squadron. We were having a bunch of disciplinary issues. I was helping them through those. The squadron commander tells me one day to come over at 10:00, “We’re gonna talk about XYZ.” I said “Yes sir.” I go over to the colonel’s office, the squadron office and outside the colonel’s office is the first sergeant — that’s where he sat. Usually he was the gatekeeper. I tell him that I am Captain Cooke, and that I am here to see colonel so and so.” The sergeant says “Yes, sir” and he tells the colonel who comes out and says ‘Wait a few minutes I’ll be with you.” I am sitting next to the sergeant’s desk waiting, twiddling my thumbs and the sergeant looks at me and says, “Captain, I’ve been in the Air Force almost 30 years, I ain’t never seen a Black JAG!” (Laughter). I said, “Get used to it sergeant.” (Laughter)

Here’s one!
But, he became a really good ally and a very cool guy. Because he was very military. His whole deal was it does not make any difference how I feel about you. What is important is that you are a captain, and I am a sergeant. You get to tell me what to do within certain parameters and that’s how we work. He was very cool. He was a good guy, I got along fine with him. But, I got the same sort of experience in this cable business. The cable business was notoriously devoid of minorities and women. It just did not exist, at least then, this is 1980, ’82, ‘83,

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’85. It just didn’t exist. So, when I would show up people would go, “Who the hell is he?” “Are you an installer? What are you doing here?” And, I would say “No, I am the lawyer.”
And, so would you just feel that?

Oh no, people would say that to you. Oh yeah, they would say it to you. I went to a hearing once with a client, an FCC field hearing in Los Angeles. It was held in a federal courthouse, I forget which one, in Los Angeles (downtown Los Angeles). The hearing starts at like 9:30 in the morning so I get there 9:00, 9:15. I’m one of the first or second people there and we are sort of sitting there. I am sitting there with my little briefcase, actually, I have a litigation bag. Another lawyer is sitting there and it is like five parties. Another lawyer comes in and it’s getting close to 9:30. He comes in and he says to me, “Mister court reporter you’re gonna have to set the equipment up over there because that way you will be able to hear everybody.” I’m like [thinking to myself] “Why do I have to be the court reporter?” You know, I am the only Black guy in the room, but I’m the court reporter? What is that? So the other guy who was there by the time I had gotten there, we had talked and he knew I was a lawyer, he was like [thinking maybe] “I don’t want to be involved in this.” (Laughter) It was great! And stuff like that would happen all the time. When I was doing this cable stuff it was like they were totally flummoxed. They were like “Who the hell is he?” But, they were always okay. It wasn’t like they were hostile–hostile. It was just like surprised. What was that about? So, we would go around and do these things all over the place — Eureka, CA, Redwood CA, little small towns in Tennessee,

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where cable companies were. First, those cities didn’t have any significant indigenous Black populations anyway and then, just the mindset was that you can’t be representing Cox Communications because they are in Atlanta and they don’t hire Black people in that company. The Cox people were just wonderful people. They were not, there was no evident discrimination or discomfort with the fact that I was representing them on whatever issues I was representing them on. Including, I was not the only lawyer representing them because they were a huge part of the firm’s business. They were cool. They were like, “Hey fine, you are our lawyer, let’s do it. What is the advice? Or, what do you think about this?” And, in fact, Bob Wright, the guy who is now in charge of NBC Universal, ran Cox Cable for a good part of the time when I was working with Cox. Bob and I got to be good friends. He went to UVA and he was a very good guy. Just a really, really good human being. So, I would see Bob in different places and he would say, “How are they treating ya?” Bob was from NY and he was always saying, “How are they treating ya?” And, I would say, “Bob, they’re doing fine, it’s not a problem.” (Laughter) He was always a little bit suspicious as to what some of his Southern brethren might be doing. I would say “Bob, they’re all fine. I have no issues.” And, I didn’t. They were good people, a quality operation.

I’m sure some people there didn’t like me, but I don’t think it had too much to do with the fact that I was Black. It was because I was a lawyer telling them they couldn’t do something they wanted to do. That was fine. That happens all the time.

So, you are a lawyer (Laughs)

Mr. Cooke:

Yeah that’s right. I am a lawyer so you know that sort of worked. So, we ran around doing cable stuff. In Detroit we went out to apply for the cable franchise out there with Mr. Sutton. As the sort of principal partner, Mr. Sutton hired Cox to be his technical expertise partner, and he was the political clout in Detroit. We hooked up with a local group in Detroit, the Bell family, who put the second Black owned and operated radio station in the country in the air in Detroit — WCHB. They had been there for a long time, this Detroit family with some money and political clout. And, that’s why we hooked up with them. So we went out to Detroit and we filed a proposal. In Detroit, as in most cities, you had to go through a kind of series of dog and pony shows with community groups to persuade them that they should support you and what benefits as a cable operator you were going to bring to their communities as a result of being awarded a franchise. We did that and we went around the city with the Bell family and Mr. Sutton and the Cox people. We talked all over. I think we had a very good proposal. We really did, it was well done. We ultimately lost to a guy named Don Bardon who was a local Detroit guy. He had hooked up with another cable television company at the time TCI (which I think no longer really exists, it has become most of what Comcast is, what TCI was), I think at least. But, anyway he hooked up with them and they were big guys at the time and they ultimately won. They had better politics. At one large public event where the Cable Television Design Commission was receiving public testimony from groups that we had gone out to talk to and were in turn coming to say what they thought was good, bad or indifferent about the proposals they had seen. In Detroit, because it could

only happen in Detroit, a group of guys got up to give their presentation and they sang their presentation. Much like the Temptations would. They had steps and they were singing and moving. And I was like “Oh my God this is great.” They weren’t supporting us. We were very upset about that, but it was a great show (Laughter). So we wound up losing in Detroit and that was a tough loss to take because we had a really good proposal. We should’ve won, but we lost on politics. Almost all these decisions are at bottom political. We lost in Chicago because we just weren’t as good as the other guys, I don’t believe. We won 1/3 of Queens, we had good politics and a good proposal. We really won here in D.C., but we lost at the end because politics reared its ugly head and zapped us. But, we had the best proposal. We won every recommendation from every group, the design commission recommended us. The only thing that killed us was we lost by one vote in the council. It was literally one council member waiting to see which way the wind was blowing. He skipped his vote and when they came back around he cast his vote for the other side. So, the other side won. It was tied until his vote.

So we did that with Mr. Sutton. I did a lot of stuff with Cox around the country as well as some other cable companies. One of our cable companies, I remember, one day the guy who ran our cable section, a guy named Jack Matthews who was just an amazing guy. Jack was totally politically incorrect. He just couldn’t help himself, but he was a good guy. He had a good heart, but Jack just couldn’t always get where the world was as opposed to where it had been. So, one day a woman named, Donna Gregg Donna worked for Jack.

[END TAPE #3, SIDE A] TAPE #3, SIDE B

Mr. Cooke:

But, anyway, Donna is working with these cable guys. She worked for Jack and these cable guys. When they found out that Donna was their lawyer, they said they wouldn’t work with her. They didn’t want a woman lawyer. And, so, we were all concerned that Jack would accede to this to this demand. You know, tell Donna that she couldn’t work on the account. But, Jack, to his credit, told the client to take a hike. He said, “Look, she’s your lawyer and if you don’t want her for your lawyer, you don’t want me for your lawyer. You’ve got a choice. You can work with Donna or you can find a new law firm.” And, that’s the kind of place it was. They were really good people. He was a good-hearted guy. He had been in the Navy and he was a miniaturist, he used to collect miniature soldiers. He had thousands of them in dioramas he had built. It was interesting. One day Jack and I are talking and Jack asks me what do I know about South Africa. I answered that I knew the political stuff, about Nelson Mandela and the struggle. Jack then tells me the story of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift and he has created a diorama about the Battle of Rorke’s Drift. He gives me a book called The Red Soldier, this about the Battle of Rorke’s Drift where more British soldiers were awarded the Victoria Cross than any other engagement in the history of the British Army. It’s really very interesting. He gives me a bunch of “little guys” as he calls them. These little British soldiers that he has hand-painted all these guys. These British soldiers in various poses and these Zulu in various poses with shields and assegai which are the short spears they used. He knows all about this

stuff. He is telling me about it and it’s really quite fascinating. I’m like, “Jack, where do you find time?” But he had a house where he had two or three rooms in his house, nothing but these little guys — drove his wife nuts. He retired and moved to Kiawa Island. I don’t know if Jack’s still alive. I haven’t seen Jack in years and years. He was a good guy, a little eccentric, but a good guy.

So we did that cable stuff around the country. Buying and selling systems and buying and selling radio and TV stations. I got to work with Gale Sayers who is a hero of mine who was part of a group who bought a number of television stations. I got to work with Reverend Jackson, both for and against Reverend Jackson which is really weird. He was protesting certain activities or non-activities on radio stations which had to do with hiring practices or programming stuff and trying to change policies at the FCC. I met a lot of political guys. Harold Washington, the Mayor of Detroit, the Mayor of Cleveland, Wilson Goode out of Philadelphia, Percy Sutton of New York, David Dinkins of New York, Tom Bradley out of Los Angeles, Willie Brown out of California, Oakland; just a bunch of people that we came in contact with, Maynard Jackson down in Atlanta, a bunch of people who we came in contact with in the course of doing this radio, TV stuff. Again, these radio and TV guys in some ways were big deals in these times because they were very popular or at least politically connected so you would meet these people in that sort of context when I was going there to help clients with different issues. And, then on the not-so-famous front, got to travel to see a lot of America because we represented radio and TV stations across the country and it was again, part of the schizophrenia, almost all of my clients were

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outside of the city. Very, very, very few were here in the city. So, I was on the road frequently. In a month, I might be out of the city half the time, 15 days out of 30 per month I was out of time.
Did you enjoy that?

Some, but it got old after a while. When you wake up and you don’t know where you are, literally. You know you’re in bed but you don’t know where, you don’t know what city you’re in. You know you’re not at home but you don’t know where you are, that’s when you know it’s too much. You lose that connection. It got to be a pain.

I remember one time I went to Atlanta. I had a big problem develop in a cable deal we were doing and we had to go through and rework some stuff. So, the guys in Atlanta said, “Fred, look you have got to come down here because on the phone and faxing and stuff is not working. Why don’t you come down here? We will work on this overnight and we’ll get this thing done.” So I agreed So I fly down to Atlanta the next morning and work all night and I don’t get back home until a week later because ‘overnight’ turned into a week to get this thing fixed. It was like bizarre. I remember that one because I went down 3 or 4 days before my daughter number 3’s birthday, and I fully intended to be back. I was going to be there overnight and there was no way I was not going to be here for her birthday, but I didn’t get back until a couple of days after her birthday which made her and her mother real unhappy. So that was sort of an issue from time-to-time. But that was just the nature of the business. When you are doing sort of the big deal kind of stuff it just consumes huge amounts of time. It is not something that’s easily

manageable that you can fit neatly into a time window to say, “Hey, okay I’m going to do this between 9-5.” It doesn’t work that way. You do the deal until the deal gets done. And, oftentimes there are a lot of pieces that have to come together and sometimes they don’t come together neatly or orderly and it takes longer than you think. So, those things were kind of fun. Like I said I started in ’78 and in ’82 I was admitted to the partnership and that was good. I became a partner and that was fun, kind of an accomplishment. I didn’t really, I can’t say I came there with the intent of becoming a partner. I really came there to take a break. I came there because I had been doing litigation most of the time, certainly over the last two years and I was kind of fatigued. This was a way to take a break and to see something else. But I always thought I would go back to litigation because that was really lawyer’s work to me. As it turned out, I enjoyed this stuff much more than I enjoyed litigation. Litigation has a whole lot of risk involved and a lot of opportunity to be unhappy when you don’t get the result you want. So, this was better for me. I felt like I was really helping somebody realize a dream, to own a radio station or a TV station. I was increasing the number of Black people who owned radio and TV stations. Theoretically, at least, beginning to make a dent in changing the images of Black people in radio and TV because arguably the people who own the stations have some say about that. So that was in a lot of ways more rewarding for me.

I enjoyed the higher education work because it was intellectually stimulating. Again, you got a chance to work with some of the best schools and colleges. I represented the University of Michigan, Michigan State, Wisconsin, University of

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Illinois, Nebraska, Cal Berkley, UVa, Ohio State, we represented a lot of really big deal schools. They had lots and lots of interesting things going on.
All public. Is that just a coincidence?
No, that was a coincidence.

So you did private ones too?
Because I represented a number of private ones too.
Yeah. We represented Cornell, for example.
Okay.
I also helped put Howard University’s public TV station on the air, which is great as a kind of a help to my alma mater.
Yeah.
We did that pro bono and we represented Howard for free, provided legal help for free and helped them do that. Mr. Sutton basically volunteered to do this with his engineering people, but we put the first Native American-owned radio station on the air, KILII at the Rosebud Indian Reservation in Porcupine, SD on the air. So, we did stuff like that. That was sort of cool and I liked doing that. I felt like I was doing something, like I was contributing something with these crazy legal skills that I had. So, those kind of things were fun to me, so I was really enjoying that.
By the time that I got admitted to the partnership I had pretty much decided that I didn’t really want to do litigation. At the firm they had asked me to do, from time-to-time stuff called “administrative litigation” and some very few piece of straight up judicial litigation. Actually, when I first went there, when I first went

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back, maybe in the first year or so, I got this other guy who had come from the U.S. Attorney’s Office and I were assigned to do this administrative litigation thing before the FCC. So, we were doing that. We were associates, but we had both been out of law school 4 or 5 years so we weren’t like totally being babied. They were watching us, but we were pretty much on our own. We crank out these pleadings and send them back to the Commission to file. Then the administrative law judge issues an order that basically gives our client what the client sought to have done. But it had a footnote that said that our pleadings, the pleadings filed by Al and myself, were vituperative and insulting. We were like, “What?!” Our view was, you know, when you are in litigation you punch the other guy’s lights out. This is not a tea party, you go for the throat.

Yes.
That’s what we did. But we did not realize that in the gentlemanly world of the FCC you weren’t that aggressive. So they were a little bit teed off at us for going for the throat so hard. We’re like, “This is what we do, we’re litigators.” And, then Al continued to be a litigator and I slowly but surely got away from that. I stopped being vituperative and insulting. So every time I see Al now, I introduce him as “vituperative and insulting Al Turkus.
That’s great.
So, anyway, I did some of that but I enjoyed the transactional, telecommunications, intellectual property work and much, much more. And that’s really what I was doing and I was quite happy doing it. It was fun to me. So, when you were partner in 1982? Is that right?

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Yeah, 1982 I became a partner.
Were you still the only African American at the firm?
No. We had some associates. We hired associates. Because by then I was on the hiring committee, so I was around hiring Black people. We had a number of associates, but they were all relatively new. Most of them were either in the law school class of ’81,’82 or so. There was a clump of them, about five or six of them. When I joined the firm, I was number 37. By the time I was a partner four years later there were about 100 hundred, I believe. There were a bunch of them. There were a lot. Wow.
It grew fast. We had an office in, well maybe not in ’82, but later, shortly after that we had an office in Atlanta and we had an office in New York City. And, then, we had an office in California near Los Angeles, (what was the name of that city?) some suburb of Los Angeles that we had offices in. The firm grew and by the time I left in ’87 there must have been 200 attorneys. There were multiple offices. It was huge. Then it shrank, but then it got big again. So, now it’s back to over 200, I think.
In those early years when you were an associate, it sound like you were really busy. Were you involved at all in local issues? Were you involved with politics at all? Or, were you working all the time?
Working all the time. But I was involved to some degree in politics. I became involved in school board things. There was an ad hoc group of people that were trying to improve the quality of school board members. And so we sort of self-

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appointed ourselves to vet candidates and to endorse them or not, you know. So, I became a part of that.
Who else was involved?
Man, I forget. I know we endorsed Carol Schwartz when she ran the first time for the school board. I know we did that. But, I forget who that group was now. Yeah, we did that and then I was involved at a very low level in some of the council races for Charlene Drew Jarvis supporting her in Ward 4, where I lived.

In Mayor Barry’s election through some people who worked for him, with him. I was part of some ‘lawyers for Marion Barry’ or some name as that. We had a reception where he came and I remember he spoke and we raised some money, not much of anything. Most folks were putting in hundred fifty, two hundred, that kind of thing, so it wasn’t a lot of money, but because of the number of us that made it turn into a lot of money at the end of the day. We did that kind of stuff. And so, I did do that. school board and council and some mayoral election but not really a lot of it. It wasn’t really a big part of what I was doing. I was doing it kind of willy-nilly. There was not a real plan to it. I didn’t have any, again I didn’t have any local aspirations. My client base was outside the city and I was really involved with the Federal Communications Bar Association and things like that that looked like they had some ability to expand my career with organizations of university and college general counsels, things like that. Where I was trying to get to be better known so that if they needed to hire somebody they would think about me, that kind of thing. I was one of the founding members of what’s now called the Black Entertainment and Sports Lawyers Association. Back when we

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founded it in 1980, it was just called the Black Entertainment Lawyers Association and the idea was to, again with the numbers of growth of Black athletes, Black entertainers to have some Black lawyers to represent them. Driven in part by one of my own personal pet peeves was that when I was in law school learning that Joe Louis basically was penniless after he had made huge amounts of money in his lifetime. But, his money had basically been mismanaged. He was not a particularly intellectual or astute man and he relied on people who just took advantage of him. And, I thought that was horrible and I wanted to sort of be a part of fixing that. So part of the reason for the birth of BELA at the time was to create a pool of Black lawyers who could be available to represent these entertainers. So a number of us who had worked in predominantly white law firms and had gained some experience in either entertainment or tax who knew a little bit about how the business worked could be helpful. So I was doing those kinds of things.
That’s interesting. Do you have more memories of the founding of BELA? Who else was involved?
I’ve got something else around here somewhere? With the 20 something odd founding members, yeah. We founded it in Philadelphia in 1980 and there was a guy here in town, Butch Hopkins and Kendell Mentor, Louise West, let me see, Larkin Arnold, Phil Asbury, there’s a bunch of people who were founders who were either in the entertainment business or who had recently come out of it and were looking for clients to develop. Later on we added sports guys to it. Because at first it was just straight up entertainers, either recording artists or people who

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were film actors, TV people. And, then later on maybe 5 or 6 years later we added sports guys to it and now it’s called the Black Entertainment and Sports Lawyers Association, BESLA as opposed to BELA. Anyway, now the weird thing about BESLA is that my daughter, my oldest daughter who is a partner at Steptoe and Johnson and does Intellectual Property work in Los Angeles… She’s in the Los Angeles office?

She’s in the Los Angeles office. She, this is what, the 20th anniversary?
Could you state your daughter’s name?
Oh, her name is Michelle, Michelle Anne Cooke. And, Michelle in 2000 was invited to join BESLA because she does entertainment work along with her intellectual property work. So, one day she called me up and she says, “What is this?” And I go, “What are you talking about ‘what is this?’” She says, “I get invited to join BESLA. I’m invited to the annual meeting at which they’re going to honor the founding members and your name is here. What is this?” I go, “Well, I’m a founding member.” “Well, why didn’t you tell me” (she says). I said, “You didn’t ask.” (Laughter). “Did it a long time ago. And I sort of forgot. I mean I don’t know.” So she was all wigged out that I had done this or had been involved in this and hadn’t told her. So now she’s a member. I am not a member any more. I’m a founder and they parade pictures of us at the annual meeting. I haven’t been to a meeting in a long time but they hold these pictures up and talk about the founding members. But they gave us a watch and a plaque and all this stuff. And I’m thinking we just sat around a room and said, “Let’s start an organization.” We got a watch for that, nice watch too. It was a nice watch. I

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still have it at home. So she’s involved in it now, doing work in entertainment and intellectual property and I’m happy for her. I am proud of her, she’s a good lawyer. I call her for advice from time to time. I don’t pay her for it though. That’s right. You already earned that.

That’s right. I tell her “I’ve already paid for this legal advice. I have a pre-paid

So were there any other affiliations, professional or political or otherwise in your early legal career besides the ones that you’ve talked about?
Oh yeah. I was a member of the National Conference of Black Lawyers Communications Task Force and we were just a pain in the side of the telecommunications industry. We ran around saying all kinds of stuff and fomenting unrest. The National Council of Black Lawyers, The National Bar Association, were all organizations that were, at different points of time in those early days, focused on sort of alleviating a problem and that’s why I was a part of those organizations at the time. It seemed to me that whenever people were cranked up to do something that we ought to get on it. So I was trying to be helpful and we would go to these meetings and raise all kinds of sand. It was great. That and the Washington Bar Association here in town, it was a local affiliate of the National Bar Association. I was active back in the early ‘80’s. And, then there was a group of lawyers here in town, Black partners in predominantly white law firms. There were a number of us. Vernon Jordan was a part of that group. Vinnie Cohen was a part of that group, a number of guys and ladies, mostly guys. One of the things we would do we would sit together and

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talk about as a kind of support group we would talk about the stuff each of us was going through and how you could build your practice, expand your practice. We tried to talk to the younger lawyers, the Black associates in these firms. Explain to them, you know, sort of how the game was played and how they could be successful. In the summertime, we would give, at somebody’s house, a get together of all the Black summer associates at the predominantly White law firms and get them together so they could meet each other, if they didn’t know each other. They could meet some of these Black partners and talk about life and some of the things they’ve been through and some of the mistakes they’d made and some of things they thought were useful to their success in the business. That was a thing we carried on for about 5 years.

In the ‘80s?
In the ‘80s. Yeah. We were pretty good about doing that. And trying to network. I learned a long time ago from Judge Draper who was just a great mentor person that the obligation I had really was to help the people behind me, the next wave. And the judge told me, and I always tell kids this, is that if they call me up or somebody says you ought to call Fred and talk to them about XYZ. Okay fine, I’ll talk to them. I take them to lunch or whatever and we talk and I tell them. They say, “Gee thank you, do I owe you anything?” I’ll say, “The only thing you owe me is that when it is your turn to sit on this side of the table you’ll do the same thing for somebody on that side of the table.” And, that’s what the judge told me. He said, “I’m doing this for you because somebody did it for me. What you’ve got to do is when it’s your turn to sit on this side of the table to do it for

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somebody else.” And I think that’s important and so we tried to do that pretty vigorously during the 80’s and I think people carried it on after I sort of got out of it in ’87 or so. It was a good idea. It’s interesting because in the, about the peak, because the numbers had steadily moved south, there were more Black partners in predominantly White law firms, I think both numerically and as a percentage of the total, in 1985 or 86 than there are now. And, it is really odd.
Really?
Yeah. . Firms got bigger, but the number of Black partners has not. Not proportionally. Not in the same proportion. And I can’t figure out why that is. A lot of the Black lawyers come in and leave. I don’t know whether it is an inhospitable environment or whether there are more options that they have, they see grass is greener someplace else? I don’t know exactly what it is. But I know, my sense is that that pipeline that you might normally expect of associates becoming partners isn’t there. There are huge gaps and it’s just really kind of interesting to see the cyclical thing happen. The numbers went down and have been going down for a while. They may be headed back up again. Most of the guys that I knew are retired now because they’re smarter than I am and they’ve retired. They’ve amassed their fortunes. So I don’t have as much inside information from guys who are senior who see the firm-wide statistics and can tell from year-to-year kind of a thing but I have more anecdotal stuff than I do actual data. I’ve got to try to get some just so that I know. It is a curiosity thing more than anything else. Not that I am going to do anything about it. I just would like to know what the numbers really are and maybe develop some sense of why the

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numbers are what they are. But it is an interesting phenomenon. But anyway, so we did that and those where good things, I think on the whole we tried to do. It worked for a while. And then, in about ’87 is when I left the law firm environment and went to work for the District Government. I became Corporation Counsel.

May I interject briefly before you go on? What caused you to take that job? What precipitated the move from the law firm to the D.C. Government as Corporation Counsel?
As happy as I was I didn’t think I was doing enough. As happy as I was with the work and the people, I didn’t think I was doing enough. Why I went to law school was sort of getting lost in what I was doing. I just had this desire, this thought that I had to do something that was more constructive. Now, couple that with the fact that I was kind of schizophrenic about living and working in my hometown and having almost no contact with it, it just exacerbated the sense of “What the hell are you doing?” So, that was really the push. I didn’t realize it. This wasn’t a fully formed thought, or series of thoughts. It happened when a classmate of mine who was working at Covington and Burling…

A law school classmate?
A law school classmate, working at Covington and Burling, a guy named Don Golden who is dead now. But Don was a partner (no he wasn’t) yes he was, he was a partner at Covington and Burling. He was doing FERC work, he hated it. But anyway. He called me up one day and he said that he understood that Mayor Barry was looking for a new Corporation Counsel, and did I know anybody who

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he could talk to about this. I told Don I didn’t really but I would try to find out for him. And in a bizarre coincidence I made a couple of phone calls, and I don’t remember who (I think Jim Dyke and somebody else) and then I get a phone call from a guy named Arnie Miller. Arnie was the head hunter that the mayor had hired to find a new Corporation Counsel. Arnie asks me if I knew anybody who might be interested in the job. I say, yes I do. I recommend a guy named Don Golden, a classmate of mine. I think he’s a great lawyer. He would really be good for the mayor, good for the city. He wants the job. I think you ought to talk to him. Arnie asked if I had any other names. I didn’t really know any other names, but I also wasn’t interested in sort of giving Don unnecessary competition so I said no. I gave him Don’s name and number. Two or three weeks later Arnie calls me and tells me that he has talked to Don, that he had talked to some other people (didn’t tell me who), who said that you ought to be on this list.” I told him no, and that I was really trying to help Don. He asks me to meet with him so that he could explain to me about the job and maybe I then could better help him figure out who might be good for the job. So I said, “Okay,” because my plan is to go and pitch Don. So, I go meet with to him, and I promote Don for the job. He calls back a couple of days later and says, “Look, the mayor wants to talk to you, and I think you ought to talk to the mayor. You don’t have to take the job, just talk to the mayor.” The mistake I made, was in talking to the mayor. When I talked to the mayor, unbeknownst to me, Arnie had decided that I was a candidate of some viability (I don’t know if he had decided if I was the only one but I was a candidate and he told the mayor that). When I meet with the mayor, he is talking

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to me in sales pitch terms. He’s not just talking about the law and the job and who might be a candidate. I had known Marion but not well. I met him when I was in undergraduate school and he was running SNCC, and when he was running PRIDE, so I had bumped into him. In a really weird twist that I didn’t realized at the time, he was married to Mary Treadwell who was my cousin. I didn’t know Mary was my cousin until after he and Mary were divorced and somehow at some family function I found out that Mary was my cousin. So, anyway, he’s pitching me on the job. I hear him and I tell him that I was really happy doing what I was doing, I am really flattered, but I think that Don would be a great choice So this meeting causes me to go home and to thing about his sales pitch. That is when it begins to crystallize what this unease I had really was. The mayor just really sort of crystallized it for me. So I thought “Damn, that’s what I ought to be doing.” I ought to be Corporation Counsel. This is a way for me to continue what I was taught at the law school, what I went to law school to do. So, I talk about in my head and I talk about it with a couple of my partners and I talk about it with my then wife who was not real happy with the idea at all.

How many children did you have at this point?
Four? Daughter number four had just been born the September before. Marion had a fundraiser at my house for the ’86 election weeks before, this is really weird, I remember this now. We had just moved into that house like in April. Where was the house?
17th and Holly NW. And we were just getting it squared away when somebody convinced me to have this fundraiser at my house for Marion, a bunch of other

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lawyers for Marion. It was sort of a big house. It could accommodate people showing up, standing around drinking white wine or whatever. But the lunacy was my wife was pregnant and the baby was born in September and the fundraiser was going to be rather in September and I’m thinking why did I agree to do that. This is not going to work. My wife’s not going to be happy about this. She’s like very pregnant, and not happy with an event at her home.
You had to pay for that one.
So, long story short. We had to fundraiser literally a week or two before the baby was born. Right around the primaries. Timing would be just before the primary like the 12th of September or something like that. So we have it and this goes away. Then after that we start having these conversations about the job. I wind up taking the job like in January of ’87. January 2, 3, 4, right at the beginning of January. So I tell my wife that I am thinking about doing this, she is not real happy about it because she’s upset still about the fundraiser in her very pregnant self and the kid, the baby is less than six months old and how are we going to make all this work. There is going to be a large pay cut, and more. But, all I’m thinking, is that I have to do this
Long story short. I take the job. I agree to take the job. Although, first I call Don. I tell him that I will not take the job if he still wanted it. Don, gracious person that he is, said “No. The mayor wants you. You ought to take the job. I have no problem with it. I can keep doing FERC work.” I feel sort of bad because he is on this seventh ring of hell doing FERC work. So that’s how I wound up taking the job. I was not looking for it. I had no intention of doing it

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because I was really trying to help Don get the job. It sort of evolved into me getting the job, agreeing to take the job. So then I tell my partners at the firm that I am going to be leaving to take this job as Corporation Counsel. They are all very supportive, and tell me that I can come back when you finish, whenever that is. I had agreed, I told Marion that I really came to be a lawyer, and that I really didn’t want to be part of the political thing. I told him that I really would stay on the job until the next election, and that if he decided to run again, I would leave a decent time before the election so it wouldn’t look like I was abandoning him. Also, I knew that I didn’t want to be a part of an election process. So I wasn’t sure when I would be coming back or when I would be finishing up. My colleagues at the firm were happy for me and supportive of me. They even filled up the room for the announcement. It was a big ego boost, and just very touching. The most touching thing was that my dad was there. My mom had been dead for a number of years, but my dad came and he’s such a wacky guy, but he came with his new wife came (he’d remarried by now) and he was beaming. He was real proud, and I recognized him from the podium when the mayor gave me a chance to speak. Later on that day or the next day when I went by his house to thank him for coming to the event, that was the first time my dad ever really acknowledged any sort of feeling, any sort of emotion to me. He told me he had never known that I was that smart.” (Laughs) He told me that I had done a good thing. He thought that being Corporation Counsel was a big deal. He told me that he did not know that I could do that.” I told him that I was just doing what he had told me to do. He said, “Thanks.” It was really interesting because my father was just

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not an expressive person. I tell my ex-wife, my ex-wife and I used to say this about both our fathers. Her father was a physician, very successful professional man, but emotionally a lot like my father. Both of us say we never felt comfortable touching our fathers. They were guys who you just didn’t touch. They weren’t touchy guys. But my kids always touched me. They were always hanging all over me and everything. I didn’t set out for it to be that way, it was just that I never would send off a signal that they shouldn’t do it. But my dad was always real clear, “Do not touch me.” (Laughter). “That’s not what we do here.” He’s a pretty cool guy. I really learned a lot from him and I’m a lot like him, I think, in a lot of ways. But that touchy thing is like, no. So when he said that that, it was really very interesting because he had never expressed any serious kind of emotional thing. It was really kind of odd, and moving. So, I went back and told my sister, “See, Dad thinks I’m smart. He never told you, you were smart.” And, of course, he hadn’t. (Laughs)

So, anyway, I took the job and wound up working for Mayor Marion Barry, wound up going to work for the government for what turned out to be three years before I got out of there.
So you were there from ’87 to ’90.
’90, yeah. Almost three years to the day kind of deal. That was, I got out near the end of ’90. That was the best job I had ever had. Best job I had ever had in the law, by far. The most fun. The most rewarding. The best job I have ever had, and I really did not want to stop doing it. It was something that I didn’t know

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what I was getting myself into when I got into it, but as it turned out it was absolutely the best job I ever had.
So, in that job what was your role? What was your function?
The Corporation Counsel, under the charter, is the chief legal officer of the government of the District of Columbia. So for all legal issues related to the municipal corporation known as the District of Columbia and all of the so called independent agencies and the instrumentalities of the government, the Corporation Counsel is the chief legal officer. They have now changed the name to the Attorney General, but it is the same job with the same statutory duties. Same thing.

Just changed the name. It is the law firm in the city with the most diverse practice in the city. There is no area of law that the Office of the Attorney General does not practice, whether it’s admiralty, or anything else. The Office does it all. It was an amazing job. There are just a huge number of very good people that you have to rely on when you are Attorney General because you can’t know all this crap. It’s just really too much for one person to master. And, it’s a 24/7 operation. It’s a corporation that runs 24/7, has right now a $5 or 6 billion budget, has 35,000 employees, I mean, it does everything. And, so whether it’s healthcare, medical malpractice, nuclear energy, public utilities, labor, intellectual property, everything, torts of all types, it does it all.

What was the state of affairs in the District in 1987 when you started as Corporation Counsel?
Well, it was, boy, chaos, chaotic. It was a lot of chaos.

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You knew this going in, right?
No, I didn’t.
You didn’t?
I didn’t. No I was blinded by the aura of the mission that I was about to assume. The practical realities had not sunk in. I had ignored them. For example, when I got to the Office of the Corporation Counsel, the day I got there, the first thing that sort of amazed me was they had rotary phones. We didn’t have any rotary phones where I worked at my law firm we all had push button phones. Well, not like now, the generation before those. So literally I got a blister on my finger for the first couple of days because I was dialing the phone and I had not dialed the phone in forever. There were no computers in the office. None. No computers. We had people who were called legal secretaries who were not really legal secretaries. The photocopy machines ran out of paper all the time, and the office did not have more paper. Oftentimes, attorneys brought paper from home. Some people brought in computers from home. I don’t know if you are old enough to remember this but Commodore 64s, computers with 64 megabytes of memory, of power. These machines couldn’t do anything by today’s standards certainly. So, we had huge equipment problems in the office. We had huge problems throughout the government. But, that was part of the challenge and it was part of the fun of dealing with all of those practical impediments that just made getting anything done close to impossible. We were still using with mimeograph machines where you type on blue paper and it creates a printing thing where you

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spin it around on a cylinder. It was very old school. There were all kinds of challenges.
And, unbeknownst to me, just after I took the job the Office of the United States Attorney began in earnest, their investigation of the government of Marion, and of the entire government. There were subpoenas everyday it seemed like. FBI agents showing up every day wanting to look at documents. It was just chaos.

So, all this stuff was going on.
Do you remember learning, the day that you learned about the investigation? Do you remember?
I remember, the thing I remember is that the Director of the Department of Administrative Services called me up and said there were FBI agents there who had a subpoena who wanted a bunch of contract documents. I asked him for more information, and he told me that the agents had a subpoena, they wanted contract documents. I speak with the agents and I am told that the subpoena was all part of an investigation being run out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. So I call Joe diGenova, the U.S. Attorney. I ask Joe what this is all about. At the time, I do not know Joe, but I pretend that I know him. I try to talk to Joe lawyer to lawyer, but Joe is not talking to me. He was being cagey. He’s basically trying to intimidate me into being over-cooperative. I tell Joe that he certainly can subpoena documents. But, I get to determine, how I get you these documents. I have a government to run. The government does not exist just to provide you with documents. I have a government to run. If you want documents, you’re going to get them on a schedule that makes sense for the government. I was not

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going to have everybody in the agency answering his subpoena. That is not why the taxpayers hired them.” So, Joe didn’t like that. But, over a very difficult course of time, we worked things out. (END OF SIDE B)

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Frederick D. Cooke, Esq. First Interview

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