William Moses Kunstler:
Untiring Civil Rights Defender

New York Times 7sep68

[More on the Black Panther Party]

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the Freedom Riders.

Jackson MS, St. Augustine FL, Albany GA, Lynchburg VA, Inglewood NJ, Washington D.C.

Even this partial list of clients and travels of William Moses Kunstler reads like a roster and road map of the civil rights movement in the United States in the '60s. "This," said that graying lawyer yesterday, "is my thing." To the list of clients whose causes he has carried courts around the country, Mr. Kunstler has no added to Black Panthers, and the letters and postcards are already coming in, unassigned as usual.

"They are all very much the same," he said. "They range from 'nigger lover' to 'if they ever get in color, they'll kill you, too.'"

Mr. Kunstler accepts the letters and threats — most recent a call from "a dignified sounding and" in Houston who promised to come to New York some weekend with five friends to kill the lawyer — with detachment.

"Over the years," he said, "I had become quite inured to derogatory letters, phone calls and comments."

"This," he said of his work, "is what I staked my life on — its feeling that I have a skilled, I had a profession that can be used in some way for social advancement, and I'm going to use it as I see fit."

Neither the law nor the civil rights movement was always Mr. Kunstler's "thing." After some wavering, however, he began a career at the bar, and in 1961, in Jackson Miss., where he witnessed the arrest of a group of Freedom Riders in a bus terminal, he found the work in which he has immersed himself.

Mr. Kunstler had gone to Jackson in answer to a request from the American Civil Liberties Union that he lend some "moral support" to Jack H. Young, a black lawyer who was defending the riders.

After witnessing the bus terminal arrests, Mr. Kunstler recalls, "I sat there, and furious as I can get. I had such a feeling of revulsion as to what was happening that I went back to Jack's office and said, ' I'd like to do some legal work'. That was the start of the change of my life."

Previously, most of the work of the law firm he operated in partnership with his brother, Michael, had been commercials.

Since then, Mr. Kunstler has served as a special counsel for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a general counsel for the Council of Federated Organizations, which sent thousand white students into Mississippi, a general counsel for the Mississippi Federal Democratic Party, and is now active in the Law Center for Constitutional Rights, composed of lawyers who specialize in handling civil rights cases.

"I have," he said, "never taken fees on any civil rights case that I can recall."

He has won some and lost some, but the case he regards as his "prize" was wanted that prompted federal Judge J. Skelly Wright to rule and in last year to the District of Columbia's controversial "track system" of assigning pupils to classes according to ability. The judge found that school authorities "intentionally" gerrymandered school districts and assigned black students to the "basic" curriculum of the four-level track system to insulate white students from blacks.

New York City's public schools were where Mr. Kunstler began his own formal education. The son of the former Francis Mandelbaum and Dr. Monroe Bradford Kunstler, a general practitioner, he was born on July 7, 1919.

The went to PS 93 and PS 166 in Manhattan, then went to Dewitt Clinton High School, where he was a member of the swimming team, and then on to Yale. The first of this 10 books was published well he was an undergraduate. Written with another undergraduate and privately printed, it was a volume of sonnets entitled "Our Pleasant Vices."

After graduating from Yale as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Mr. Kunstler enlisted in the army has a private in September, 1941, and was assigned to Fort Monmouth, where he appeared in a play "Whistling in the Dark," that opened on December 7, 1941. "We had a full house," Mr. Kunstler said, "because nobody could leave the post."

Mr. Kunstler went to Officer Candidate School, rose to the rank of major with the Eighth Army, saw duty in the Pacific as the unit's signal intelligence officer, and one the Bronze Star.

Discharged in March, 1946, he began classes at Columbia Law School although he was not convinced that he wanted law as a profession. When I got out [of the army] I wanted to write and not go to law school."

He wrote book reviews for The New York Times, The Herald Tribune and other newspapers and magazines, and supplemented his income by teaching writing in Columbia's School of General Studies.

After graduation from law school in 1948, he went to work for Macy's as an executive trainee, inspect his time writing a manual for department managers.

It was then that he joined his brother in the practice of law. Mr. Kunstler was married on January 14, 1943 to a distant cousin, Lotte Rosenberger. They have two daughters, Jane, 19, and this is Karin F. Goldman, 25, who just returned with her husband from a stand with the Peace Corps in Senegal.

The Kunstler's live in a rambling "early kaleidoscope" 11-room house in Mamaroneck, whose top floor is rented out.

Mr. Kunstler says that he has little time for recreation, but that he relishes his work, which he described as being "a combination actor, public speaker, writer — all wound up in one."

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