Terry Brackett and Pamela Horowitz

[00:05] TERRY BRACKETT: Hello. My name is Terry Brackett, and I am 73 years old. Today is Monday, January 24, 2022. I am located right now in Sarasota, Florida, and I will be speaking today with my very good friend, Pamela Horowitz. Pamela?

[00:26] PAMELA HOROWITZ: That would be me. I am 75 years old. It's still Monday, January 24, 2022. I'm in Sarasota with Terry, who is a longtime friend, and today will be interviewing me.

[00:51] TERRY BRACKETT: All right, Pam. Pam and I were both attorneys who practiced in the DC area. In fact, we had offices in the same building. Pam, how long have we known each other?

[01:05] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Well, normally, I would say about 40 years, since we were in kindergarten together. But since we've already had to reveal our ages, the 40 plus years is true.

[01:20] TERRY BRACKETT: Well, at least you didn't say way too long. Tell me a little bit about where you grew up and went to college, into law school.

[01:32] PAMELA HOROWITZ: I am a Minnesota girl, raised in Minneapolis, where I stayed to go to undergrad at McAllister College in St. Paul, and then went to law school at Boston University.

[01:51] TERRY BRACKETT: And what did you do when you graduated from law school?

[01:54] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Well, I decamped for Alabama, where I spent the first year in Mobile, actually, in an adjacent town called Pritchard Alabama, which had just elected a man who was billed as the first black to defeat a white incumbent mayor in a major Alabama city, using the terms major and city loosely, but it was really at the cusp of the period when black candidates started winning mayoral races. So this. This person's name was Jay Cooper, and he was something of a first and came home to. To mobile, which was him, as his hometown. And so I went there as soon as I graduated from law school, spent only a year. And then I went to the Southern Poverty Law center and became only the third staff attorney at an organization which now, of course, has grown into the hundreds, but was then a far humbler version of its current self.

[03:15] TERRY BRACKETT: Just out of curiosity, how big was Pritchard?

[03:20] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Pritchard was about 45,000.

[03:22] TERRY BRACKETT: Oh, I was sick.

[03:24] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Yes, it was not tiny. Tiny. It was. It was. But it had everything cut out of it that would have been productive in terms of taxes, and all of that had been annexed by mobile. So it was very, very, very poor, under financed city. Still is.

[03:47] TERRY BRACKETT: But a suburb of mobile.

[03:50] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Yes. Contiguous. A city contiguous to mobile.

[03:55] TERRY BRACKETT: I know that civil rights is very important to you, but exactly how and when did you. I mean, you obviously moved in that direction when you graduated from law school. But what drew you to that?

[04:08] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Well, it's the reason that I went to law school, although I can't say that civil rights was a burning interest even when I was in college, even though that's when I was in high school. And college was when the modern civil rights movement was peaking, but it was happening without my paying much attention. So I guess for me, the more impactful events were the assassinations in 1968 of first Martin Luther King and then Robert Kennedy. And by that time, I had graduated from college. I was working at a company called Control Data, which was a computer manufacturer heavily involved in defense industries. And so I began to develop a strong anti war feeling and just the idea that I wanted to do something else with my life. And, you know, I went to college at a time when I. I was smart enough to know that I didn't want to be a teacher, which was probably the pursuit of 90% of the women in my class at McAllister and everywhere at the time. So I majored in economics, having really no idea what I was going to do with that, and receiving the only advice I got from my advisor when graduation was upon me was to not let an employer know that I was only going to work until I got married and had children. And my consciousness level was such that I was not offended. I probably thought that that was reasonable advice. But by having worked for a few years and having become more politicized because of the war, doing some volunteer work that involved issues of race, I had developed a bit of enough of consciousness to know that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life working at control data. And I certainly did not want to get married and have children then. And so for me, it was kind of like there had been a headline in the paper saying, law schools across the country now taking admissions, because no one had ever suggested that that might be something that I was interested in. But I knew that I wanted to do. That was a moment in time when there were a lot of people going to law school out of messianic urges and partly because of the war, what was known as the Warren Court, when the chief justice was Earl Warren, and the court was seen as capable of transforming, really a lot of issues in society as certainly a vehicle for social change. And so I started law school in the fall of 1970 with that, with the idea that I wanted to do civil rights and poverty litigation. So the southern poverty Law center was always in. You know, once I decided on law, school was always on my radar. It's just that you never knew how small they were, because by their fundraising letters, you would have thought that there were at least 100 lawyers working diligently on dozens of cases. And, in fact, there were three. And luckily for me, one of them decided that he would rather teach and decamped for Georgetown law School. In fact, he's still there. So it was just the two founders and me.

[08:20] TERRY BRACKETT: As I recall, you at a very young age, still wet behind the ears in terms of law school, had argued before the Supreme Court. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

[08:33] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Yes. Yes. Well, I always say that I got to argue in the Supreme Court and before I was actually eligible for membership in the. In the Supreme Court bar, because you have to be out of law school for three years. And then my career was downhill after that. But it was. But it was a great beginning. It was a. It was a lawsuit against, originally filed against height and weight requirements, which eliminated most women from state trooper jobs and prison guard jobs. And we won the case in the lower court, and we had already sued the state troopers for race discrimination. They didn't want to tangle with us anymore, so they did not participate in the appeal. But the prison system appealed it to the Supreme Court. And so the issues on appeal were, this was the first gender discrimination case that the court took under what was title VII, what is commonly known as Title VII of the Civil Rights act of 1964. And the court had ruled that you could have disparate impact as a cause of discrimination. It didn't have to be intentional discrimination. So the issue for us was whether that was going to also apply to cases involving gender discrimination, not only race. And then a secondary issue was whether women could work in contact positions in maximum security prisons.

[10:19] TERRY BRACKETT: And were you successful?

[10:20] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Yes. Well, we want. The major issue was the first about disparate impact, because that opened the door for many, many cases. And it's very hard then and now to prove intentional discrimination, harder now than ever, because everybody is wiser and knows what their requirements are to avoid intentional discrimination. But so we want. We won the court saying that you could prove, and we did prove discrimination on the basis of a disparate impact, but they ruled that women could not work in contact positions, which was disappointing because the lower court judge had been the judge who handled a case involving conditions in Alabama prisons. So he knew much better than any member of the supreme court what the prisons were like and whether women could handle that atmosphere. And so it was a poke in his eye and a disappointment to, to my client, of course, who was, who had a degree in criminal justice from the University of Alabama and had long wanted to work as a prison guard. And was really the perfect plaintiff. She did get a job in the prisons. And then the ironic postscript to her career in the correctional system was that she was eventually fired because she married a fellow prison guard, and the nepotism rules eliminated her from her job.

[12:17] TERRY BRACKETT: Now let's talk a little bit more, maybe about your personal life. And when you look back, who do you think, I know you went in the direction of civil rights after law school, but I, who would you say had the biggest impact on your life, and what do you think you learned from that person?

[12:38] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Well, I guess for me, that's pretty easy, because it was my husband who was active in the civil rights movement and spent his life as a civil rights leader. And he always referred to himself as a race mandeh, which meant in the Du Bois tradition, the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, of spending a lifetime in pursuit of the betterment of your race.

[13:17] TERRY BRACKETT: And who was your husband?

[13:18] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Julian Bond, who had been a founder of the student nonviolent coordinating committee in his, his youth, 1960, and then became a Georgia state representative and senator and eventually the chairman of the national NAACP. But basically, you know, as I say, devoted his life to civil rights issues. And he was, he was the first president of the Southern Poverty Law center. So we both had a long association, and I'm currently on the board of the center. So I certainly had other mentors, including the founders of the center and a man named Charles Morgan, who became my law partner when I went into private practice and who himself was very active in civil rights, had to leave Alabama because he gave a speech, an incendiary speech after the bombing of the 16th street church in 1963. But as just one person, I'd have to say Julian.

[14:34] TERRY BRACKETT: Well, and I believe that you have recently written, edited a book called Julian Bond's a time to teach. Tell me about that process. What made you decide to do that? How did it come about? What's been the result?

[14:52] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Well, thank you for asking about the book.

[14:55] TERRY BRACKETT: Let me put in that plug.

[14:57] PAMELA HOROWITZ: It was published a year ago right now, in fact. And so just days ago, the paper book, the paperback edition, came out. It's published by Beacon, as Terry said, it's called Julian Bond's time to teach. And it's. I never say that I wrote a book because Julian wrote it. I co edited the book with Jean Theo Harris, and Jean was Julian's student when he taught at Harvard and then his ta at Harvard, his teaching assistant. And she wrote the definitive biography of Rosa Parks. So she was the one of us who actually knew what she was doing. And she had. She'd been published. Her Rosa Parks book was published by Beacon. So Beacon had been very excited by the idea, the idea of this book, and supportive whenever we were ready to do it. And it turned out that we did it at a very important time in terms of what was happening with race in the country. Ironically, now, we had. It is a compilation of Julian's lectures from the course he taught for more than 20 years on the history of the civil rights movement. So it's chronological, but it can be read. You can dip into it if you're interested in one particular event or one particular year, or you can know, read it straight through as a chronological history of the modern movement. And one of the uses to which we hope it's put is in schools as a textbook. Although. Although we don't want it to be limited to that, because it's a pretty fascinating story and something that I think every american should be aware of no matter the time. It's not time sensitive. You need to know this story whenever you're contemplating american history. But now we are confronted with the many laws that states are passing to prohibit the teaching of race. And right here in Florida, we have a particularly venal example. And so teachers, they are so broadly written, and of course, the ACLU and I hope the southern poverty law center gets involved in some of the cases. I mean, these laws will be challenged, but the fact that they're out there, and this is all the rubric of critical race theory, which I don't think most people even know what it is, certainly not the people who are passing these laws. And so the real idea is to scrub american history in the name of not having white people feel guilty.

[18:18] TERRY BRACKETT: So I assume that you think that it may be difficult, like in Florida, perhaps now even in Virginia and Texas, to get this book into the schools.

[18:27] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Right. But maybe that'll make it even more desirable. You know, there's. I read an article recently about, there's also sort of a complimentary movement, led really more by parents to get books out of schools and school libraries that deal with issues of sex and particularly gay sex. And it's very early in this process. This is, of course, not the first time that these issues have come up, but it's a recent kind of re explosion of the issue. And I did read an article saying that it was having the opposite effect, that now people are more interested in these books than ever. Probably a lot of them didn't. They didn't even know that the book was in the library, so we can hope. And already, because of George Floyd and all that, that has meant, you know, we are. We've been at a moment about, in terms of race, it's just we're not sure whether, you know, it is only a moment or is it a movement or where is it going to take us. But it was already an elevated issue. And so it may be that this kind of attention or prohibition makes people more. More anxious. But I know I have some friends who teach, and I know that it has made them nervous about what, just exactly what the parameters are and what they can teach, which is, you know, pretty scary. And the United States of America.

[20:09] TERRY BRACKETT: Yes. Since it is part of our history, oddly. But I know that the book came out during the beginning of COVID Correct?

[20:22] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Right. Came out in January of 2021. So it was the end of our.

[20:29] TERRY BRACKETT: First year of COVID And that probably had some impact on your being able to go around the country. Normally, you would have had a book tour, I assume.

[20:38] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Yes. I mean, it had an upside and a downside, because if we were going to have to limit our activities during COVID for us personally, it was a good time to be inside at home alone, editing a book. But as you say, when the book came out, it meant that we couldn't do any in person events. The upside to that was we did Zoom events in places that we probably would not have been able to go. And so I think we may have reached a larger audience. But all of the, most of them were sponsored, some sponsored by organizations, and including ones that Julian had a long involvement with, like the NAACP and the Southern Poverty Law center. They did events. University of Virginia, where he taught Harvard book store, because he had also taught at Harvard. But most of them were bookstores. And I. And I think that I know the owner of a major independent bookstore in Washington called politics and prose, and I know that their experience was in their Zoom events. They didn't sell nearly as many books as they. They would have had the event been in person, which I guess makes sense, because if you show up at a book event in person, you're kind of expected to buy the book. You might want it to be signed, and you don't have those same factors when you're zooming.

[22:14] TERRY BRACKETT: So you haven't gotten writer's cramp from having to sign books.

[22:18] PAMELA HOROWITZ: So it might have been that we reached a larger audience, but we sold fewer books. I'm not really sure, but I. But we were. We were happy to be able to do zooms, and we were joined sometimes by other scholars or writers about. About race. And that was so, it was, it was fun to do it. And, you know, in Zoom, people can write, you know, can write in with questions, and that makes the one who's going to answer the question be able to choose the question. And that's always, that's always makes.

[22:53] TERRY BRACKETT: That's always good. Yeah. Having been on a couple of those Zoom calls, I think what made it really interesting for me as a spectator was the panels which brought different aspects to the book, different viewpoints in terms of how things. So that was an upside. Of COVID There are some upsides. Well, obviously, you and I have had lots of discussions over many, many years, but particularly closer in these last few years. How do you think your life has been different from what you might have imagined it to be when you graduated from college or even high school?

[23:43] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Well, as I alluded to earlier, I grew up in an era where I was expected. I don't remember that anybody sat me down and said, you will get married and you will have children, and that will be the principal occupation of your life. But that was the message that you sort of got from everywhere. And partly because you were not told that you could do other things. So teaching was something you could do. And you saw, because I look back on my education, I went to public school throughout, and certainly in elementary school, all the teachers were women. But even in, you know, junior high and high school, the vast majority were women. So you kind of thought, hmm, that's what, you know, that's one of the things women do. So. And we had hope chests, which now just strike me as so offensive, but I dutifully filled my hope chest just.

[24:45] TERRY BRACKETT: In case people that listen to this don't know what a hope chest is, Pam.

[24:51] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Yes, well, it's. You hope that you're going to use what you put in it in your married life. And it would literally, they're supposed to be cedar line, which is, which I had, and I had. I actually, and I had no real money. I worked, and, you know, but I. So I had a minor amount of money to spend on my own amusement, and I somehow managed to buy knives, which I still have from your home chest. And they were in my home chest. And then my mother had some, you know, needlework that women in her family had done. So pillowcases and tablecloths and that. So that's what you put in your hope chest.

[25:37] TERRY BRACKETT: Well, at least you got some use out of that.

[25:40] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Yes. So to that extent, my life, you know, my life is very different from what I contemplated in when I graduated from high school and even college, but not so different from, by the time I got my act together a bit and decided to go to law school, you know, that was still pretty new. I mean. I mean, I always say, if I. The main reaction, if you had a conversation with, say, a cab driver and, you know, what do you do? I'm in law school. Oh, you're going to be a woman lawyer. You're going to be a lady lawyer. And I wanted to say, no, I'm going to have a sex change operation on graduation day. So, yes, that's the idea. But, I mean, there's still. I went to Boston University, and it happened that we had the largest percentage of women in our entering class of any law school in the country. But of course, we didn't choose it for that reason, because we had no way of knowing. But that was 25%, and that was, as I say, the most at the time. So being a lawyer was certainly not a woman's, not regarded as women's work. And we were not necessarily welcomed by professors. And there were professors who out loud said, I'm not happy to see women taking up seats that should go to men who will actually use their degree.

[27:15] TERRY BRACKETT: And her law school was dramatically larger in terms of the number of women, because I went to the law school started five years later, I think, and I had, out of 150 in my law school class, there were nine women.

[27:32] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Wow.

[27:34] TERRY BRACKETT: Now, four years later, it was 50 50. I mean, it changed very, very quickly.

[27:39] PAMELA HOROWITZ: That's what happens once you let them in.

[27:42] TERRY BRACKETT: But then there are also, as I recall, and you might, too, some limitations on where you were encouraged to practice law in terms of the field. Domestic law was a good one, maybe.

[27:53] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Wilson. Wilson Estates.

[27:54] TERRY BRACKETT: Wilson Estates, exactly. So, well, given your absolutely fascinating life, which I think is, I sort of live vicariously through Pam, is there anything that you would change if you could live your life over again?

[28:14] PAMELA HOROWITZ: You know, I guess I'm fortunate enough to say no. I mean, what I really wanted to do at some point was be a sports announcer. Howard Cosell was the major male sport, and he was a lawyer who had decided after he became a lawyer that he wanted to be. So I wanted to be a female Howard Cosell. And having spent a weekend watching football, we can say with some authority there still are really very. I mean, there are women who are doing some, you know, they do all the sideline reporting. There are some who do the color. There are a few who do play by play, but not with the big boys and not on playoff weekend. And I would have been really good at it.

[29:05] TERRY BRACKETT: She would have been. She knows everything about football. She has even gotten me. She's not a big, huge football fan, although I do like basketball, but it's.

[29:15] PAMELA HOROWITZ: An act of true friendship.

[29:17] TERRY BRACKETT: Exactly.

[29:18] PAMELA HOROWITZ: That. She spent the weekend watching football with me.

[29:21] TERRY BRACKETT: Exactly. You know, we bonded through football. What can I say?

[29:24] PAMELA HOROWITZ: My husband didn't even like football. He was not a sports fan.

[29:29] TERRY BRACKETT: Oh, God. Well, let's just talk a little bit. For two years, we have been living through Covid, and given that time period, we've talked about some of the positives of your book and how you had panels and you reached more people. But what else have you learned during the period that you hope would continue that you've learned through, you know, during this pandemic period?

[30:01] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Well, you know, I say about getting older, that you become more of what you already were. And part of that is you, you, you value more of what you already valued. And so I think for me and Covid, friendships probably were the most important thing to make it through, not least ours. You decamped for Florida part of the time, so you're not in DC. And so I have a friend there who we early on decided that we would be a pod, even though we didn't live together. And that evolved into having dinner every Tuesday and every Saturday. And so that made a lot of difference. And having been widowed in 2015, I already knew the value of friendships. And your husband died a year later. And so our friendship only deepened. And so I feel, you know, I feel very fortunate really, to sometimes I, Terry, since you opened your house to me last winter and we're still speaking to each other.

[31:26] TERRY BRACKETT: Exactly.

[31:27] PAMELA HOROWITZ: That, you know, that really made a huge difference last year. And we were, you know, we were able to do a lot of things. I sort of quit telling people what we were doing because they were staying home and being miserable and we were out and about, but being careful and still being careful.

[31:47] TERRY BRACKETT: I mean, the one advantage you have here in Florida is it's a warmer winter. So we had outdoor restaurants, we had outdoor theater. We, even the Oslo, which is one of our big theaters here in Sarasota, had outdoor, they built an outdoor stage and you could go to the theater and be distanced. And the actors were very careful because they redid the kind of place that they did so that they were distanced on the stage. So you're right. It was a lot. It was luckier here.

[32:19] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Yes. Yes. The, but we would like it to. We're ready to have it in.

[32:27] TERRY BRACKETT: Yes, I think we all are. And I want to kind of try to something positive. Let's assume that the pandemic ends tomorrow. What would you do given that you were a little bit, you know, were able to do some things that other people weren't able to do? What would you do now?

[32:52] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Well, first I would have a bonfire of my masks, which, of which I have dozens, and that we've already now learned that they're really not very useful, even if the pandemic is still raging. So.

[33:05] TERRY BRACKETT: Because we have very attractive cotton masks to match outfits.

[33:09] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Yes. Many mini masks. So. And I, you know, I would, there are some people that I would like to see who have been very careful, so I haven't really gotten to spend as much time with them. And I would do that. I'm hoping. I have a friend who's living in Helsinki, and I'm hoping to visit her. And so I would probably book that, even though now they're talking about sending troops into the baltic states. And that's another problem with going to Helsinki. But, you know, I think more, more travel and just being able to make plans without having to say, well, you know, we have to see what Covid does that it will be nice when we're not, we're not having to say that.

[34:00] TERRY BRACKETT: Because you had planned a trip to Alaska.

[34:03] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Right? We didn't go.

[34:06] TERRY BRACKETT: Yes. Yes. Well, let me ask you two more questions if you're comfortable. Tell me what your very best memory. Now let's start off with your most uncomfortable memory. It could be sad or just an uncomfortable situation, whatever.

[34:33] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Well, I guess my saddest memory is when Julian was dying. And luckily for both of us, it was not. It was a short illness and I had a wonderful support system, but it was, you know, it was very, very painful. And then, and then when he died, after he died, we had, we had what I consider a, you know, really wonderful marriage, which I thought even, even when he was alive, it's not something that I decided only after he died. And I'm happy that he knew that he was the great joy of my life. But after he died, there was something that happened between us when I thought I had treated him badly. And that made me that very, very sad to think about it. And the friends that I was with said, you know, it took you three days to come up with this one.

[35:38] TERRY BRACKETT: Thing out of how many years of marriage?

[35:41] PAMELA HOROWITZ: 25. 25, you know, but I still, every now and then I revisit that, you know, the time that I behaved badly and wish that I could, you know, erase it.

[35:55] TERRY BRACKETT: So let's end on a positive note. What's your best memory?

[36:00] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Oh, dear. Well, I guess I really do remember the first time I laid eyes on Julian, and it was one of those across a crowded room kinds of things. And it was pretty great.

[36:14] TERRY BRACKETT: Very special. Well, Julian was a very special person, and we traveled together as couples, went around many places. And then, and now Pam and I are traveling.

[36:28] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Right. Many places.

[36:30] TERRY BRACKETT: Many places. So. Well, thank you.

[36:33] PAMELA HOROWITZ: Well, thank you for doing this. Thanks, Storycorps, for having us.

[36:37] TERRY BRACKETT: This was very fun. Thank you so much. And we've met our time period, time allotment. Am I so.