By Mark Potts
law community
[Editor’s Note: The Alumni Magazine’s Mark Potts interviewed J. Gerald Hebert, JD ’73, this summer, a few months before he passed away at age 74 after a battle with brain cancer.]
J. Gerald Hebert, JD ’73, who passed away in September, walked with history.
When civil rights leaders re-created the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Selma march on its 25th anniversary in 1990, Hebert was there, accompanying King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Harry Belafonte.
“I didn’t get to march with Dr. King, but I did get to be with Coretta,” Hebert, long a prominent civil rights attorney, recalled in an interview this past summer. “Just to be in the presence of some of those people who had inspired so many before me, just to listen to Coretta talk about her time with Martin—it made me feel like I was almost there.”Hebert passed away at age 74 on September 7 after a battle with brain cancer, leaving behind his wife, Victoria, five children, ten grandchildren, and a truly remarkable professional legacy.
Walking with Mrs. Coretta Scott King was a fitting high point for an attorney who argued many civil rights and voting rights cases, first as a special litigation counsel, then acting chief of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, and later in private practice, representing U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Hebert served as Lewis’ legal counsel on voting rights and also represented U.S. Rep. Cleo Fields (D-La.), U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), and other members of Congress in cases involving efforts to gerrymander majority-Black districts out of existence.
“Representing John Lewis, of course, who’s a national hero, was one of the highlights of my career,” Hebert recalled. “I could go to his office, and they would holler into him, ‘Hey, John, your lawyer’s here.’ I thought that was the greatest thing to hear, you know, that they knew who I was. And he would always give me a hug and tell me how much he appreciated me.”
Hebert’s affinity for civil rights had its origin in his days at Suffolk Law. “It was definitely a calling for me,” said Hebert, whose college and law school years coincided with the political and social turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s. “There were people trampling on civil rights. It bothered me a great deal watching all that. And I vowed that if I ever got a chance to be involved, I would fight it.”
He got his chance right out of law school, when he was hired by the Department of Justice and assigned to a series of school desegregation cases, including the landmark Liddell v. Board of Education for the City of St. Louis, which resulted in shifting thousands of Black students from majority-Black St. Louis schools to county schools and the creation of magnet schools to attract white students.
As the longtime executive director and director of litigation of the Campaign Legal Center (and more recently senior director), Hebert continued to work on voting rights cases. He said that many of the challenges he dealt with early in his career continued in the present. “What I have learned is that you have to take a long-term perspective on civil rights,” he said, knowing that new Supreme Court rulings could reverse previous hard-won gains.
Janai Nelson, HLLD ’23, president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, worked with Hebert at the Campaign Legal Center (CLC) for over a decade. Nelson, Suffolk Law’s commencement speaker last May, worked as co-counsel with Hebert and a team of other civil rights attorneys in Veasey v. Abbott, fighting successfully against Texas’ voter photo ID law. That law, they argued, barred more than half a million voters from fully participating in the democratic process.
Among other lines of reasoning, the CLC team asserted that obtaining a voter photo ID was expensive and in many cases required distant travel to government offices in a state where nearly a fourth of the counties do not have a driver’s license office.
“With respect to Gerry, and his two decades of work at the Department of Justice, his work leading the CLC,” Nelson said, “there’s no question given the forces that we face today, that the voting process would be in an ungovernable state were it not for the work that he did to help advance and evolve our democracy. He really was a soldier protecting voting access.”
Hebert followed Dr. King’s philosophy that the long arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. “As long as it keeps bending, that’s the key,” he said. “I continue to fight for equality. And I always look at cases and ask, ‘OK, well, who is getting the short end here? And why are they in the position they’re in? Why hasn’t somebody helped them out? And can I do anything about that?’ Well, sometimes the answer’s no. Oftentimes, the answer is yes, I can do something—all I have to do is try.”
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winter 2024
On March 21. 1965, demonstrators began marching from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, calling for voting rights.
[Editor’s Note: The Alumni Magazine’s Mark Potts interviewed J. Gerald Hebert, JD ’73, this summer, a few months before he passed away at age 74 after a battle with brain cancer.]
J. Gerald Hebert, JD ’73, who passed away in September, walked with history.
When civil rights leaders re-created the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Selma march on its 25th anniversary in 1990, Hebert was there, accompanying King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Harry Belafonte.
Image of J. Gerald Hebert courtesy of the Hebert family