Asian May Lead U.S. Justice Group

One of the nation’s top public interest lawyers could soon be leaving Los Angeles for a bigger job--chief of the U.S. Justice Department’s civil rights division.

White House sources disclosed recently that Bill Lann Lee, western regional counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, is one of two finalists to succeed Deval Patrick as assistant attorney general for civil rights.

If Lee, son of a Chinese immigrant who ran a small laundry in Harlem, is nominated by President Clinton and confirmed by the Senate, he would be the first Asian American to head the civil rights division.

“I want the job because I think I could help the division realize its potential,” said Lee, 48.

“The work of the civil rights division is to represent a vast array of citizens in this country who haven’t gotten a fair shake, who haven’t gotten what our laws promise them,” Lee said. He said the position would offer an opportunity to be both an important law enforcement official and to play a role in improving the nation’s fractious race relations.

A Silver Lake area resident, Lee will be in Washington this week for talks with elected officials and others about the possibility of his heading the 250-lawyer division. The other leading contender for the job is Judith Winston, an African American who is general counsel of the U.S. Department of Education and a former official of the Women’s Legal Defense Fund.

Lee’s supporters stress that as an Asian American who has spent most of his career working for an organization whose primary constituency is African Americans, he could play a particularly important role as a bridge builder among various ethnic groups. They stressed that he is committed to an inclusive vision of civil rights enforcement.

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He has broad support across racial lines in the civil rights community, including the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, as well as from environmental lawyers, California’s two Democratic senators, veteran black congressman Charles Rangel of New York, and even some Republicans, including Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan.

In an interview, Lee stressed that his father’s life experiences inspired him to become a civil rights lawyer. “My father spoke English badly. He did not say much, but he tried to carry himself with dignity. He dressed like the poor man he was. What was most remarkable was that he was a fierce patriot,” who, although he was overage, volunteered for the Army in World War II, fought in the Pacific and made sergeant. “He told us that he felt like an American for the first time in the Army because he had found he was as good as anybody else.”

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Lee, who is married and has three children, said his father clung to his patriotism “even though he was often denigrated as a ‘dumb Chinaman’ and taunted with gibes of ‘no tickee, no washee.’ ” The soft-spoken attorney became teary as he described the pain his father felt when he came back to the United States after the war and initially couldn’t find a place to live “because some landlords didn’t want a ‘Chinaman.’ ”

Lee said it took him a long time to appreciate his father’s “belief in the American dream,” in the face of daily indignities.

After excelling at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science, Lee won a scholarship to Yale College. After graduating with high honors he matriculated at Columbia Law School, where he also was a top scholar and did research for professor Jack Greenberg. A veteran civil rights lawyer, Greenberg had succeeded the legendary Thurgood Marshall as director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the multiracial legal organization that won the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case and has been at the forefront of civil rights litigation for more than half a century.

When Lee graduated in 1974, he joined the Legal Defense Fund. He has worked on a broad array of civil rights suits including school desegregation, employment and housing discrimination.

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“There are few lawyers who have his breadth and depth of experience in civil rights,” said Theodore M. Shaw, the associate director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, who has known Lee for 15 years.

Lee, generally working in concert with other lawyers, has won a number of noteworthy victories. Among them are a 1985 case that yielded housing for Hawthorne residents displaced by the Century Freeway, a 1987 case against Lucky Stores that eliminated barriers to the hiring and promotion of women and minorities, and a 1991 case in Los Angeles that led to a vast expansion of California’s efforts to screen poor children for lead poisoning.

Lee said he is proud that many of his cases had concluded with settlement agreements in which all sides had worked to find common ground.

“I don’t like to end cases with enmity and bitterness,” he said. “It’s been my experience that you can work out practical resolutions and defendants frequently feel very good about that. Lawsuits often are the vehicle for moving forward together.”

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That approach certainly impressed Riordan, who first met Lee when they were on opposite sides of a major federal lawsuit in which the Legal Defense Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California represented thousands of low-income bus riders who had accused the MTA of neglecting poor and minority bus riders in order to build rail lines for more affluent commuters. The suit was settled late last year with the MTA pledging to cut the cost of monthly bus passes and freeze fare increases for two years.

“The work of my opponents rarely evokes my praise, but the negotiations could not have concluded successfully without Mr. Lee’s practical leadership and expertise,” Riordan wrote in a glowing endorsement letter to White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles. “What makes his work special is that he has represented clients from every background, including poor whites, women and children suffering from lead poisoning,” the mayor added.

Lee could face attacks from the right if he is nominated. Staunch affirmative action foe Clint Bolick, litigation director of the Institute for Justice in Washington, attacked Lee and Winston last week in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article. Bolick described the Legal Defense Fund as “arguably the most left-wing civil rights group.”

In response, Lee said: “I don’t recognize the LDF as a left-wing organization. It speaks more to Bolick’s perspective than anything else. The kind of cases we’ve brought and won are the best kind of cases lawyers could bring to enforce the civil rights laws enacted in 1964, as well as the 14th Amendment, which was enacted in 1866. We’re just applying legal principles that should be acceptable to everyone.”