Carl Maxey and the fight against Segregation

Edited from the writings of Jim Kershner
By Dale Raugust

(Jim Kershner has written several articles on Carl Maxey and a biography, Carl Maxey, A Fighter’s Life which was published in July, 2008. A copy may be ordered from Amazon.com. or from any quality book store. Sources and quotes are used with the permission of Jim Kershner)

“Maxey never knew his mother or father. He was born in Tacoma on June 23, 1924, to a woman named Elizabeth Cooper and immediately given up for adoption to Carl and Carolyn Maxey of Spokane”. His adoptive father abandoned the family when Carl was four and Carolyn Maxey, unable to care for him, gave him up to “Spokane Children’s Home as a charge of the state. Carolyn Maxey died soon after of heart failure, alone in a downtown apartment.”

Maxey became the protector of the only other “colored” child at the Children’s Home, Milton Burns, who would become Maxey’s lifelong friend and the source for most of the information from Maxey’s early life. The children in the home including Maxey were regularly abused and beaten by the assistant superintendent and when Maxey was 11 the superintendent was arrested for sexually abusing some of the boys. Both men confessed and were sent to prison. Neither Burns nor Maxey were involved with the sexual molestation. “Thank God they didn’t like black kids.” Maxey later said. The scandal “sparked a general round of housecleaning” and the new board governing the House adopted a motion to remove Maxey and Burns from the home and not allow any further “colored” children in the home. This was in 1936. The two boys ended up in Juvenile Detention as the only place that would take them. “After a few months, both boys were rescued from the Detention Center by a remarkable figure: Father Cornelius E. Byrne. Byrne offered to board the two boys at his Indian mission school…in DeSmet, Idaho.”
Maxey was big and strong and soon became the star of the school’s baseball, basketball and football teams. “Father Byrne also taught the boys the science of boxing.” Maxey also became a conscientious student. “I haven’t known any fathers in my life,” Maxey said later. “The closest thing I had to one was that Jesuit priest.” Maxey left the mission at age 15 after Father Byrne granted him one last favor, a full scholarship for Maxey to attend Gonzaga High School.

After high school Maxey entered the military service in 1942 and then in 1946 arrived back in Spokane to be confronted by a refusal to serve him at the bus station cafeteria, despite the fact that he was in full dress uniform. Maxey resolved, at the age of 21, to become a lawyer.
After a brief stay at the University of Oregon he attended Gonzaga University on a boxing scholarship. Maxey went undefeated in his collegiate career and won the NCAA championship, the first NCAA championship of any kind for Gonzaga. Maxey became a local hero. Over a thousand fans greeted him at the Spokane airport when he returned home from the NCAA tournament. The fans rushed the plane and Maxey and other boxers were carried on shoulders through the screaming mob. Maxey then retired from boxing to focus on his law school studies. He passed the bar in 1951.

In 1919, an African American man received a judgment of $200 from a Spokane jury for being forced to sit in the balcony at the Pantages Theater. The Chronicle said the judgment “is of widespread importance, for it means that negroes can not be segregated from whites in any place of public amusement in the State of Washington.” That was not to be however, for segregation continued in Spokane’s restaurants, hotels and other public accommodations. “No Colored Patronage Solicited” signs were common and swimming pools were for whites only. At the edge of Wallace Idaho the good citizens of the town placed a sign that declared, “Nigger, Read this sign and Run”. The “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone” sign that can still be seen today in some restaurants replaced the previous “white only” or “no colored patronage” signs from the 1950s and 1960s. Once Maxey got his law license he began to sue restaurants and other establishments which refused to serve black customers. One of his first cases was a threatened law suit against the public school system for refusing to hire a well qualified black teacher. In 1951 the district hired Eugene Breckenridge in response to this threat.

In the 1960s and 1970s Maxey sued several private clubs arguing that “private clubs had the right to discriminate in any way they pleased, but not if they applied for a public right—the right to sell liquor.” Later he took on the subtle segregation of blacks from certain residential areas in Spokane. Realtors had a policy of steering blacks towards the “area for Negroes …which was said to be bounded by Division on the west, Altamont on the east, Ninth on the south and Sprague to the North. Today it is called the North Central neighborhood.” Maxey debated “James S. Black, president of the Washington Association of Realtors, four times on the issue of housing segregation in the 1950s”. In 1946, the Supreme Court outlawed restrictive covenants which according to Maxey “gave them the foothold to blast their legal foundations out from under them.”

By the 1960s, attitudes began to change. “The scenes of police dogs and fire hoses and little girls escorted to school were deeply shocking to many Northerners.” Maxey said that “we could actually fight back a bit…and touch people’s humanity.” When a white barber refused to cut the hair of a black Gonzaga University Fulbright scholar from Liberia, Jangaba Johnson; 35 of his fellow Gonzaga students, 29 of them white, picketed the barbershop. The incident was featured on CBS news the following day. Maxey filed a complaint with the state Board of Discrimination which after just three minutes of deliberation ordered the barber to cease discrimination. “Later in 1963 Maxey gained national exposure for taking the case of Will Cauthen, a young black fugitive from Georgia…who was convicted of killing a white gas station attendant…He escaped from prison just days before his scheduled execution. Cauthen hid out as a farm hand under an assumed name for three years near Warden, Washington” until he was captured. Maxey represented him at his extradition hearing and was able to establish that his trial, which lasted only a day, lacked fundamental due process. Washington’s governor eventually refused to extradite Cauthen.

The following year Maxey volunteered with two other Washington attorneys to provide legal services for the Mississippi voter registration drive known as Freedom Summer. “He helped free Stokely Carmichael and hundreds of other volunteers from jail and he walked the streets with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Maxey was shocked by the conditions he witnessed in Mississippi and called the state the “tail end of America.”