History and the People Who Make It: Martha W. Barnett

Transcript edited by Pierce Butler

This is the third in a continuing series of excerpts from transcripts in the collection of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida.

One of the first women to study law at UF, Martha W. Barnett led a varied legal career and was elected president of the American Bar Association in 2000. She was interviewed by Dr. Paul Ortiz on November 18, 2009.

Paul Ortiz: Let’s start midstream with the Rosewood case.

Martha W. Barnett: Okay, we were talking about the Rosewood massacre and I was looking at your picture on a Rosewood memorial honoring some of the white people who were instrumental in saving a lot of the people that lived in Rosewood [The Rosewood massacre was a violent, racially motivated conflict that took place during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida, United States. At least six blacks and two whites were killed, and the town of Rosewood was abandoned and destroyed during what was characterized as a race riot].

And I mentioned to you that the only house still standing after the massacre was that of the grocer, Mr. [John] Wright, and how helpful he had been in hiding some of the people as the violence took place. But also not on there, are employees of the Cummer & Sons Cypress Company [1922-1959]. The Cummer family owned the mill that was adjacent to Rosewood and they had a rail line that ran from Cedar Key, I guess into Gainesville, and ultimately up to Jacksonville.

That night of the violence, when the violence erupted and the town was burned, they ran their cars through Rosewood very slowly and allowed women and children, no men, they wouldn’t let—what we were told, no men could get on the train.

They allowed women and children to get on and they got them out of Rosewood, took them to Gainesville. Others went to Jacksonville and then from Jacksonville they dispersed because it was a major transportation center. Some live in Gainesville, and their descendants, to this day.

[A] lot of the people who converged on Rosewood were from out of the local area. We know that people came because it was carried in the newspapers all over the country, what was taken place. We know they came in from surrounding areas, distant from Rosewood and Gainesville. The local people, they had lived very peacefully and comfortably together, the people of Rosewood, for a long time…

Our law firm represented the survivors of the Rosewood massacre in seeking compensation from Florida legislature and also seeking an acknowledgment from the state that, seventy years ago, the state of Florida had failed to protect its citizens when they were being attacked, and that the failure was based on racial bias and discrimination and prejudice…

The phone rang and I happened to answer it…And he says, well, my name is Ernest Parham and he said,…I’ve been reading about this Rosewood case for the last couple of months and he said, a lot of what they are saying is not true. He said, I was there. I saw it all. He said, I’ve been quiet for over seventy years, but I was there…and I can’t be quiet anymore. I want to tell somebody what happened. He came to Tallahassee. He was ninety-five years old, ninety- somewhere in there, an elegant man. He had all of his faculties. He had been eighteen years old at the time. …He described for us exactly what happened. He went to his grave with the names of the individuals who participated. He would not confirm or deny that because he had witnessed a murder, a criminal act, and he just simply would not do that…

Our clients were then twelve survivors who had been children at the time, eight to twelve, thirteen years old. He was a young adult and he was white. So we had these black children whose memories may or may not be as good as an adult. He simply validated and confirmed a lot of what we expected and he added so much to the credibility and the strength and the foundation of our position.

I always thought it took a huge act of courage for him, in the twilight of his life, when he didn’t even have to admit that he had been there, for him to come forward with the truth. …

PO: You were saying you were the first woman to work with the firm [Holland & Knight]. What was the legal culture like for women in law at that time?

MWB: It was a transition period. When I started at the University of Florida in 1970, I don’t know, there were less than ten women in my class. And I don’t think there were more than twenty or twenty-five women in the law school. I vividly remember walking up the first day I went to the law school. Everybody was crowded around in an open area and I remember looking around going, where are the women? It was just alien to me that there were not women…

[The] attitude was, Okay, maybe we’ve got to hire a woman and so I think in the early [19]70s was when you had women entering the profession [and] pressure to have women as part of law firms. Then it took about a decade for the tokenism of it, I think, to say, they really are serious. These women want to practice law…

[O]ne of the major roles of the ABA is to vet federal judges. The President of the United States would provide the ABA a list of individuals…The ABA would do an investigation, all confidential, but to advise the White House on whether the person was qualified or not based on intellect, temperament, integrity…nothing to do with a political position, but professional qualifications.

When I was President [of the ABA], the then new president of the country, George [W.] Bush, decided not to use the American Bar Association for that role. He rejected a fifty-three year policy of presidents and would not give us the names…

So George Bush, I think, felt that lawyers were a political group and he didn’t have any confidence in the information, I guess, that they would provide to him…[T]he ABA continued to vet these lawyers, these nominees, but we became an advisor to the Senate Judiciary Committee, first and foremost…

This president, [Barack] Obama, has gone back to the position that all presidents … since Eisenhower to George Bush, has gone back to providing the names in advance of nominations to get this confidential look a person’s qualifications.

An audio podcast of this interview will be made available, along with many others, at www.history.ufl.edu/oral/feature-podcasts.htm.

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