Since graduating from Oberlin in 1965, William McNeill has worked across the country for over four decades to defend the civil rights of the marginalized. This past weekend he spoke to fellow Oberlin alumni in a lecture titled, “The Right Time, the Right Place, but the Wrong Attitude” and also accepted the Oberlin College 2007 Distinguished Achievement Award. During his whirlwind weekend, McNeill sat down with the Review to talk about how he got to where he is today.

How did you decide to become a lawyer working on civil rights cases?

I couldn’t get a job when I first got out of college because I was 1A [in the draft]. A fellow classmate heard about my situation and told me about this civil rights conference and [that] they were looking for somebody to coordinate it. The National Council of Churches was the entity that was trying to do that. So I went, applied, got the job. That job was setting up a conference with civil rights lawyers and other people interested in civil rights before President Johnson was going to have a White House conference on civil rights.

I met a whole lot of lawyers for that job who kept saying, “Why don’t you go to law school? You’re from Oberlin, you can get into any law school you want.” My response was: I just got through with 16 years of school, I’m not interested in doing law. I want to do something else. I’m tired of writing papers and all that stuff.

I was living with my then-wife in Brooklyn, and we had a landlord who always insisted on fixing things himself. And this time he had left a valve off of a radiator and it was a steam radiator – so when [my wife] woke up, the apartment was filled with steam. She thought it was smoke and that the apartment was on fire and got out and then figured out there was no fire and then went back in. A lot of the stuff was damaged — water damaged.
I told him that I thought he should be paying for getting all this stuff refinished from the steam damage. And he said, “If you don’t like it, move.” We felt that that was quite unfair, so I called some of these lawyers that I had worked with and they told me to go down to the NYU landlord-tenant clinic, and of course we didn’t qualify because my wife and I made way too much money. I sort of came to the realization that if this could happen to us, it could be happening to anybody.

So I went to law school at the University of Michigan. Back in those days (1968) there weren’t a whole lot of programs that I was interested in. But there was a guy there who had run the Mississippi Project in 1964 for [Congress of Racial Equality] and he was going to law school. He was the guy that sent the kids who got killed. [3 CORE members were killed in Mississippi in 1964, apparently by the Ku Klux Klan, after they went to Mississippi to investigate the burning down of a church that had been used as the site of a “freedom school” for black children.]

He had met some lawyers down there that were going to set up a law firm in New Orleans and everybody was going to do civil rights stuff. We made an informal pact. I decided that this was what I was going to do, I was going to be working on behalf of people I thought were underrepresented and were being hurt by the system.

I first became a public defender in Boston, then I went to Atlanta and became a litigator on behalf of employment discrimination cases, and I’ve been doing that ever since. I am now…[at] the Legal Aid Society of San Francisco—Employment Law Center.

What are you working on right now?

We have a case in Mississippi involving 76 black workers who are employed at the Norbrook, Ships Inc. And we’ve sued that company for having a hostile work environment for black workers and for failing to promote black workers.

What has been the case you’re most proud of?

I worked on integrating the San Francisco Fire Department. Integrating certainly for women, getting more minority people into the San Francisco Fire Department and getting those already there promoted.