
A law degree did not guarantee that a Black person would find work in their field in the late 1950s. In New Orleans, for example, many Black lawyers delivered mail.
According to the Amistad Research Center, Nils R. Douglas thought about working at the U.S. Post Office before he partnered with Lolis Edward Elie and Robert F. Collins to create a law firm.
As attorneys for the Consumers’ League, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), NAACP and Black Panthers, the lawyers became essential to the civil rights movement. For instance, the firm won a U.S. Supreme Court case involving students who participated in the 1960 sit-in at a McCrory’s lunch counter.
The court declared the city’s ban on sit-ins unconstitutional.
In a 1964 interview for Robert Penn Warren’s 1965 book, “Who Speaks for the Negro,” Douglas said the Black community was not asking the white community to give it anything. “We’re only asking that we be accorded the same basic rights and opportunities which have been accorded to white people.”
Born in New Orleans in 1930, Douglas graduated from Dillard University in 1950. He earned his law degree in 1959 at Loyola University College of Law.
Douglas ran for several public offices, according to Amistad. In 1963, he ran for the state Senate and House, and ran for the House again in 1966. The Black community supported his campaign, but there were not enough Black voters to elect him, Amistad states.
After that campaign, Douglas helped to form the Southern Organization for Unified Leadership (SOUL) to register and mobilize Black voters.
A Greater New Orleans Louis A. Martinet Legal Society founder, Douglas was commissioner in the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court magistrate section from 1973-1986. He was inducted into the National Bar Association Hall of Fame shortly before he died on Christmas Day 2003.
For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.