11
William T. Mason, Jr.
TRANSCRIPT: WILLIAM T. MASON, JR. (2 of 2 interviews)
Interviewee: William T. Mason, Jr.
Interviewer: Cassandra Newby-Alexander
Interview Date: March 12, 2008
Location: Offices of the Robinson Law Group, Norfolk, Virginia
Length: Approximately 2 hours, 26 minutes
START OF INTERVIEW
CNA: I’m going to start off with asking you, what did you do after law school?
WTM: That’s easy.
CNA: Yeah, I know. [To another person] Are you ready?
Okay. So let’s get started. What happened after you completed your law school training?
WTM: I returned to Norfolk. I learned that none of the bar review courses that were operating in Virginia would admit any blacks to their program. I think there was one at William and Mary, there was one someplace in northern Virginia, Alexandria, another one out in the Charlottesville area, but none of them would admit blacks. The people or the person who ran this course at William and Mary would sell you a copy of his law review notes and this was what black graduates who wanted to take the bar, this was about the only route, well the practical route. You bought a copy of the notes, which I did, and I began to study them and talking with practicing lawyers here and so forth, and in due time I took the December, 1950 bar exam. They have one twice a year. The one in June was out in Roanoke and the one in December was in Richmond, and I had no desire to go to Roanoke and I wasn’t ready for the June exam, so I took the one in Richmond. There were a lot of people there and I saw some people who were from Norfolk. These were white law students. They had gone to—. Of course they hadn’t gone to Howard but in any event I saw them there and recognized them, talked to some of them, got their names so that when the bar list was published of those who had passed why I recognized several of these people on this list.
So I took the bar exam in December. The results came out in February of 1951. Fortunately my name was on the list and I passed.
CNA: So were a number of the other people you recognized during the exam, were their names on the list?
WTM: Oh, yes, and I can even recall one or two right now whose names were on the list then and who began practicing just about the time I did.
CNA: Who were those individuals?
WTM: Oh, dear. Well one was a lawyer, his last name is Bright, and unfortunately I can’t recall his first name at the moment, but a few years later he lost his license because he was convicted in federal court of a criminal charge. He was sentenced to, I don’t know, ten years or something like that and he subsequently served his time was released but he’s never been able to get his license back. He had two sons and by the time this unfortunate occasion happened his sons were grown, they had graduated from law school and were with him in the same law firm that he had, and they had about four or five or six lawyers in the firm, but nobody else in the firm was implicated in the charges for which he was convicted. He was a good lawyer too, a very good lawyer, very nice guy too.
In any event, some of the others, they’ve either retired or died. I just at the moment don’t recall any of the names, but I remember him because he was very good.
CNA: So what did you do in the interim between finishing law school, preparing for the bar, and then taking the bar? What did you do in the interim?
WTM: Well I worked in my father’s office. My father was a licensed real estate broker and he had a business, a small real estate business. He also in addition to representing buyers or sellers he represented property owners; that is to say he would be their agent and rent their property and see that it was maintained and that type of thing, management in other words. He was also a licensed casualty insurance agent. He didn’t sell any life or health insurance but he sold casualty insurance. So he had an office and I helped out and did what I could in that office. At that point I wasn’t licensed. I subsequently became licensed as a real estate salesman and as a person qualified to sell casualty insurance but at that time I wasn’t.
CNA: So after you successfully passed the bar, what happened after that?
WTM: Well of course in preparation I talked with other lawyers in the area, minority lawyers, because none of the majority law firms would hire any minority. None of the public agencies, like the city attorney, the commonwealth attorney, or for that matter the state attorney general’s office or the United States attorneys, none of these areas, and others where they hired lawyers—the Corps of Engineers has a small staff of lawyers here—none of them would hire any blacks, so that was not a possibility. But I talked with the black lawyers and the only office where there was more than a single solo practitioner were the two women lawyers who were practicing here, Bertha Douglas and T. Ione Diggs. T. Ione Diggs had preceded me from Howard law school by about two years. I think she finished in 1948 and she came back, passed the bar, and joined Ms. Douglas and they formed a firm. But none of the others were in a position to hire or have an associate in their offices, so new lawyers would open their own solo practice, new minority lawyers. Of course a lot of the white lawyers did the same thing too, for that matter.
CNA: So is that what you did?
WTM: Oh yeah, that’s what I did.
CNA: And your office was located?
WTM: In the Metropolitan Bank—well it’s called Metropolitan Bank Building, which was on the northeast corner of Church St. and Brambleton, and the building faced Church St. In fact its address was 700 Church St., and that’s where my office was. My father had an office on the ground floor in that same building. He was on the Brambleton side. And there was at least one black lawyer who had been there many years in that same building who was very helpful, because you don’t really realize how little you know until you start practicing.
CNA: Who was this attorney?
WTM: His name was Walter L. Davis and he’d been here since about 1918.
CNA: What were some of the things that he instructed you about?
WTM: Well, little things that they don’t teach you. They don’t have time to teach you all these details in law school, especially in a national law school, these local rules for instance. Every court has local rules. Usually they’re written and you go to the clerk’s office and get a copy. And the mechanics: How do you file a civil suit? What is the jurisdiction of the court? If your contest is above a certain amount and you can choose whether you go into civil court or whether you go into circuit court. Just what I call the meat and potatoes, how do you handle a preliminary arraignment in a criminal case, and so forth, and how do you handle discovery, which is very important, whether it’s a criminal case or a civil case. Of course for a lot of this stuff there are forms, you can buy the form books and so forth, but even after you buy your books you’ve got to buy a code. Everybody has to have a code. This was before they had computers and therefore this stuff was in books. Those are the kind of practical things. You have a client who’s been arrested; how do you arrange bond? Who are some of the bondsmen in the community? These are what I call practical matters.
CNA: Were there any issues or ideas that he taught you about regarding black attorneys practicing in an area during that period?
WTM: Well, of course you learn, or where you have someone who’s been practicing they will frequently share some of their experiences, and if, for instance, at that time some of the courts still maintained segregation in the audience. For instance, if you went down what would then have been—. It was called general district court but it would be traffic court, and that judge at that time instructed his court personnel—and that would be a deputy sheriff—that blacks were to be on one side of the courtroom and whites were to be on the other. Of course we all thought that was purely unconstitutional but thinking it and figuring out a way to attack it were two different things. That was just practices in individual courts, practices of individual judges, and these are something that unless you have been in a court you don’t know. For instance, if you are going someplace in the area but you’ve never been there one of the things that was expected on your first appearance would be that a fellow lawyer would introduce you to the judge. Now the fact that you passed the bar and you’re licensed, he doesn’t know you from Adam. The clerk doesn’t know you, or the clerk’s staff. They don’t know who the heck you are. You show them your bar card and so forth but still the custom was that you would get a lawyer who was already admitted in that court to introduce you to the judge.
CNA: Did you ever have a white lawyer do that, or was it usually a black lawyer?
WTM: Well, if you knew someone who was up there, black or white, that’s who you would ask, and I’ve had it done by white lawyers, I’ve had it done by black lawyers. But once you make two or three appearances in a court after you’ve been introduced they know you. Black lawyers stand out because there are so few of you, so right away they know you but they may not know this white lawyer who has been there half a dozen times because he’s just another white lawyer, so you had high visibility.
CNA: Now were there any judges in this area who were notorious for enforcing segregation policies or perhaps being harsher with blacks accused of crimes?
WTM: There were some. I mentioned this judge in what is now called general district court. It had a different name at that time but it performed the same function, which was to hear traffic matters and misdemeanor criminal cases, and there was a judge here in Norfolk who did that and I’m sure there were others, say in Portsmouth or in Virginia Beach, because Virginia Beach didn’t exist. It existed but it was part of Princess Anne County back in those days. So there were some judges who had a poor reputation among not only black lawyers but among white lawyers because if they had black clients the word got out pretty quickly if you had a judge who had an inclination to put heavier sentences on black defendants.
That was not a problem just peculiar to our area. That was true all over the state. One of the results, one of the things that happened as a result of these what we call sentencing disparities, was the fact that the state—well I say the state but through cooperation with the Virginia Supreme Court they had statutes passed creating a commission whose job was to design a fairer sentencing procedure, because the problem was not limited to just state courts. You had the same problem on the federal level, and the feds, Congress, passed statutes creating a commission that prepared what is known as federal sentencing guidelines. Of course it wasn’t necessarily always on a racial basis but the problem of disparity in criminal sentencing was one that was fairly widespread.
CNA: How did this process evolve here in Virginia to establish these guidelines?
WTM: Well, I’m sure as the result of a lot of complaints. Number one, it’s very hard to appeal a conviction in Virginia. It’s easier now but then it was harder. The way our appellate system works certain cases you have a right to appeal, but the bulk of cases your right is conditioned on the willingness of the appellate court to hear your case. They want to control the number of appeals that they hear and so in theory they have this—well in practice too—they have this right to determine, well here is a case that does not raise any new issue, does not challenge the interpretation of some statute, or the language in some statute, and we don’t need to waste our time on this, so you don’t get a motion. Well you make a motion for a writ which will allow you to appeal, and if they don’t grant you the motion your appeal is dead, so it’s very hard. The efforts to appeal were numerous; the successful appeals, that is, just to get the court to hear you, were much smaller; and then the reversals were even smaller, so it was very tough.
CNA: So were you involved in getting that procedure changed?
WTM: Oh, no, no. An individual lawyer would have no input unless that lawyer was perhaps president of the Virginia State Bar, or something like that, and the bar was proposing certain rule changes, which they do. That’s part of their job. They have something called a council and that council from time to time will propose changes in the rules and that sort of thing to the supreme court, and then the supreme court will consider and decide whether they will or they won’t.
CNA: So who was responsible for getting this changed?
WTM: Oh, I haven’t the slightest idea. I mean I wasn’t involved in it directly or indirectly. Number one, I didn’t handle that many criminal cases and unfortunately most of the criminal cases that I handled appellate issues were so infrequently raised that you seldom got an opportunity to even file a notice of appeal, well you could file a notice, but have a basis for going forward, and if you were court appointed theoretically the state would pay for things like the transcript and the expenses. If you were retained you had to have a client that was well heeled because it could be very expensive, way beyond just the attorney’s fees. There were other expenses in connection with the appeal.
CNA: What were some of those other expenses?
WTM: Well number one you needed a transcript. To have a transcript you had to have a court reporter. In Virginia for a time, especially when I started, they didn’t necessarily have a court reporter on felony trials. Only if you thought that some issue might be raised that you might want to appeal if you lost would you, the litigant, go out and hire one. It is only in relatively recent years that they have—. That system was not a good system, was not a fair system, because people who were too poor to hire lawyers, obviously they couldn’t hire a court reporter, so that was unfair, and they changed that so that the state started paying for court reporters. But the system has gone through several changes now. In federal court they had staff court reporters there and therefore they didn’t have that problem. Now whether you could afford to buy a transcript was a different issue, but the government provided them there and they had a record and if you couldn’t pay for it then the government would pay for it once your indigency was established. But it just was a difficult situation, to say the least.