CALL ME PHAEDRA. Lise Pearlman
activity.8
The FBI agent who opened Fay’s file candidly described the informant as “somewhat irrational” and acting on “nebulous or almost completely insignificant” observations, but still wrote up Fay Ethel Abrahams and her foreign-born roommate. Neither had any history of suspected activity, but the agent noted, “They have male friends who visit them and they are gone until late at night.”9
SOURCE: FBI file on Fay Stender, Vol. 1
Fay first became a blip on the FBI’s radar screen in September 1952 when she was a senior at Cal – just one entry. The FBI agent considered the informant “somewhat irrational” and his observations “nebulous or almost completely insignificant.” Yet the agent duly recorded the address of Fay and her foreign roommate [Betty Lee] and noted, “They have male friends who visit them and they are gone until late at night.”
Dating back to 1940, the University of California had an informal policy in place against the hiring of known Communists. Yet growing paranoia throughout the next decade fed the assumption that Cal still ran the risk of being overrun by Communists. In 1949, the Regents instituted a formal loyalty oath and fired eighteen professors who refused to sign it. The professors’ reinstatement in 1951 came only after the ACLU obtained a ruling that the Regents’ acted unconstitutionally. The administration’s attempt to muzzle campus political dialogue would simmer for years and ultimately erupt a decade later in the Free Speech Movement, with Fay among those at its forefront.
In the ’50s, of the 69 faculty members dismissed throughout the nation during the McCarthy Era, 31 were at the University of California. Others were scattered among 26 other colleges. As Fay well knew, one of the academics at the center of this political storm was Stanley Moore, whom Reed would be forced to fire in 1954. Moore suffered the consequences to his career for many years afterward. The controversy on the liberal campus reverberated for more than forty years, with Bob Richter leading the charge among Reed alumni in the 1990s to have the trustees apologize and its president welcome Moore back. Only then did Moore reveal that he had quit the Communist Party in 1953 in protest over mass arrests and anti-Semitic persecutions by Stalin. When Moore was hauled before HUAC in 1954, his refusal to answer the committee’s questions had been solely a matter of principle.
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Fay graduated Cal in January of 1953 with honors in English. Still under Stanley Moore’s lasting influence, she felt no loss in missing the June celebration with its senior ball, beach party, banquet and barbeque. But the class motto seemed appropriate: “The sky’s the limit.” She obtained a part-time job at the Bacteriology Department at Cal. Fay worked as a secretary, while she enrolled in graduate school courses in political science and looked into law schools.
The University of Chicago Law School had a reputation as one of the best in the country. It also generated excitement among progressives familiar with Professor Karl Llewellyn, who had just recently joined its faculty after a quarter of a century at Columbia. He was one of the leaders at the time of the “Legal Realism” school of thought developed in the first half of the twentieth century — the belief that the law was a flexible tool which balanced competing interests to accomplish particular public goals. Legal Realism would later be credited as the forerunner of a number of multi-disciplinary programs in law and economics, political science, feminist theory and racial studies.
The University of Chicago Law School had a large Jewish contingent of students and professors and, in 1953, was one of the top ten choices in the nation for women applicants. It also offered a full academic scholarship. This was key. Annual tuition was $738, several times the cost of a legal education in state law schools. Fay’s parents would not support her going to graduate school in Chicago. Fay eagerly registered for the new LSAT, given in February, obtained letters of recommendation and accompanied her application with a short essay on Chaucer, the $5 application fee, and a recent head shot of herself in ponytail and bangs.
Fay also described a novel project she proposed to undertake in law school — looking for correlations between the judges’ political party and their rulings in various types of cases. Maybe that was what caught the admissions’ committee’s attention. In the last week of June, Fay received her letter of acceptance, followed a month later with a full tuition scholarship. Fay was Chicago bound.
Fay Abrahams, U.C. Berkeley senior year, 1952
Photo courtesy of Karma Pippin
Fay included a recent head shot of herself in ponytail and bangs with her application to the University of Chicago Law School. She received a full tuition scholarship to attend that fall.
Source: https://www.facebook.com/pg/UChicagoLaw/photos/?tab=album&album_id=414378531279
The University of Chicago Law School was known for promoting “Legal Realism” – the belief that the law was a flexible tool that balanced competing interests in pursuit of societal goals. Legal Realism was the forerunner of future multi-disciplinary programs in law and economics, law and political science, feminist theory and racial studies.
∎ 3 ∎
Intellectual Boot Camp
and I lust for justice ……and I invent the mother of courageI require not to quit.1
— JUNE JORDAN
In September of 1953, Fay joined nine women among over 100 students in the University of Chicago’s entering law school class. The progressive university had admitted women since its founding in 1902, although their attrition rate had always been high. Its first dean concluded coeducation was the wrong approach and, upon returning to Cambridge, experimented with a short-lived female-only law school.
Fay’s parents could take some comfort from the fact that Chicago boasted the third largest concentration of Jews in the world. Prominent Chicago labor lawyer Arthur Goldberg had recently served as President of the American Jewish Congress. (He would later be named a Supreme Court Justice and Ambassador to the United Nations.) Sam Abrahams may have been aware of physicist Enrico Fermi’s war-time nuclear experiments completed at the University of Chicago that permitted America to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki and usher in the atomic age. (Years later, the government revealed the location of Fermi’s makeshift laboratory in an underground squash court a couple of blocks from the law school.)
The city also had a large African-American population, renowned for gospel singing and innovative jazz. Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and Nat King Cole had honed their styles in Chicago. The “King of Swing” bandleader Benny Goodman hailed from the Windy City. He was born to a large Jewish family in a westside slum near the railroad yards. In the 1930s, Goodman introduced audiences at the historic Congress Hotel on Michigan Avenue to the first integrated big bands.
Fay harbored only a vague awareness of Chicago’s persistent racial divide, where tensions had begun mounting during World War I when the “Black Belt” south of the Loop could no longer accommodate newly arriving African-American families. Full scale riots had erupted in July of 1919, causing by far the worst racial violence Chicago ever experienced. Similar incidents of beatings, torture, lynching and arson across the country that summer of 1919 gave rise to the term “Red Summer” –- the most horrific interracial strife that the country endured in the twentieth century.
In the aftermath of Red Summer, many white homeowners put restrictive covenants on their deeds to prevent blacks from moving into their neighborhoods. Fay undoubtedly had an index card in her shoebox file with notes