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The withdrawal of the Civil Rights Congress left a vacuum soon filled by Thurgood Marshall, chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and future U.S. Supreme Court justice. On December 15, 1950, he appeared before Judge Ralph J. Smalley, asking to represent John MacKenzie and Horace Wilson. Several weeks later the Princeton Committee to Free the Trenton Six, a group of Princeton professors and clergy, brought in Arthur Garfield Hays, legal counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a highly regarded civil rights attorney, to represent Ralph Cooper, Collis English, and James Thorpe (see figure 10). Hays was nearing the end of a storied career. He had grown rich defending corporations and became famous defending civil liberties. Among his previous clients were Nikola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian anarchists executed in 1927 for a murder they denied having committed; the Scottsboro Boys; and John Thomas Scopes of the Tennessee “monkey” trial. He received his law degree from Columbia and formed his own practice, profiting greatly from defending Wall Street firms. In 1912 he became general counsel for the ACLU and remained active with that organization for the rest of his life.1 Joining the ACLU’s Hays, who remained in New York City and commuted, was Trenton lawyer George Pellettieri for Cooper, English, and Thorpe. Pellettieri had an unusual career. In his youth he sang in churches, in concerts, and for the radio. He studied voice and instrumental music in Trenton and in New York City. He then turned to law, graduating from New Jersey Law School in Newark in 1929, opening his own law firm in Trenton that year, but still singing opera “at the drop of a hat.” He served as judge 119 chapter 5  Second Trial, Prosecution 120 jersey justice of the Trenton District Court for a five-year term, appointed by Governor Moore. He grew to be a powerful force in the Mercer County and New Jersey Democratic Party politics. Five years before the creation of the Social Security Administration, he campaigned for a government program to aid the elderly poor. A champion of liberal causes, Pellettieri was regarded as one of Trenton’s foremost criminal and labor lawyers.2 Frank Katzenbach III remained as counsel for McKinley Forrest. In January 1951, Thurgood Marshall brought in black lawyer Raymond Pace Alexander to work in his place for MacKenzie and Wilson; Marshall’s role was to make sure defendants had good counsel rather than doing the job himself. Alexander had graduated from Harvard Law School in 1924. After settling in Philadelphia, he successfully represented plaintiffs in some of the earliest school desegregation cases in the United States, opening up a number of previously all-white schools and districts. In 1951 he won a seat on the Philadelphia City Council. He also worked for desegregation in public accommodation in Philadelphia and throughout Pennsylvania. He served as counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which is why Marshall brought him into the Trenton Six case.3 Local black NAACP lawyers Clifford H. Moore and J. Mercer Burrell assisted him. Moore had served with distinction as an artillery officer in Italy in World War II, receiving a Purple Heart and Bronze Star. In 1948 Federal Judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, Phillip Forman, named him a law clerk while he was in his last year at Temple University Law School.4 In total, the Six went from four lawyers in their first trial to six this time, and three of the lawyers were black. The NAACP’s involvement extended beyond the direct work of its lawyers; its Legal Defense and Educational Fund created “The Fantastic Case of the Trenton Six,” a widely circulated eight-page pamphlet that explained their situation and asked for donations. Although all the attorneys regarded the continuing protests of the Civil Rights Congress as unhelpful, the group contained a mixture of personalities and styles. Pellettieri and Hays argued forcefully and forthrightly, willing to challenge conventional thinking, legal and otherwise. Alexander and Katzenbach were more circumspect, kept a lower profile in court, and deferred more to authority. Alexander, unique in the group, incorporated quotations from poetry and otherwise used flowery rhetoric when it suited him.5 In spite of their differences, the men worked well together, pitching in to aid each other when necessary. [3.14.70.203] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 18:51...

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