In June of 1968, Frank Deale was playing basketball with high school friends when the landmark Supreme Court decision of Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company was announced over their boombox.
The Supreme Court sided with Jones, a Black man, who charged that a real estate company in St. Louis refused to sell him a home in a specific neighborhood because of his race. Frank underlines this as an extraordinary decision, even during this time, as it was one of the first SCOTUS cases where they applied civil rights statutes to private actors.
“It was clear that state and government actors could not engage in forms of racial discrimination, but this was the first time non-discrimination laws were enforced and imposed on private actors. The Court has since backed up, but this is when I first realized that I had to check out law as a career.”
Frank has long-engaged in political activism, attending demonstrations while doing work for anti-affirmative action initiatives and other pressing issues of the time. He worked with legal nonprofits through high school and college, so he had exposure to the law and public interest practice. Inspired by and graciously indebted to Jack O’Dell, who worked alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. until he was accused of communism by Kennedy and dismissed, Frank began taking inventory of his interests and goals.
With Mort Stavis, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights
“I felt at the time that I needed to know more about constitutional law because I was interested in government and social change.
I needed to know about civil rights, as that’s an anti-discrimination branch of constitutional law. I needed to know the criminal justice process because people of color have always had problems with the police.
I needed to know about labor law because I was interested in workers’ rights. I wanted to know how the courts worked, because I essentially wanted to be a litigator.”
Frank followed his passions through a BA in history at Antioch College and then through law school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1976. He admittedly stuck with courses he thought would move him towards meeting his goals, while avoiding less-obvious courses of value to the social justice movement, like taxes, corporations, and credit/debit law.
When asked to reflect on his overall law school experience, Frank affirms that his main problem with law school was that there was “too much of it.” Frank spent most of his time in law school buried in books and admits that, at the time, he wished he spent more time reading outside of class and doing more than schoolwork. In hindsight, he realizes there were educational gaps on account of his choices, but he gleaned valuable insight that informed his trajectory.
When he first started law school, Frank thought law professors “cooked up schemes and theories” that lawyers would then use to engage in serious social change. In 1972, Frank saw Anthony Amsterdam, then a law professor at NYU, argue successfully against the death penalty in the Supreme Court. Frank watched Amsterdam win and ultimately take 200 people off death row. He was astonished that lawyers could have that kind of impact.
“These ideas I had of law professors were shattered, once I went to law school. I felt a few of them were intellectually stimulating, but by and large, they were so deeply into law as legal science and tried to keep so many perspectives out of classroom discussions. I began to resent law professors almost as a class of workers, and, of course, they didn’t think of themselves as workers either.”
Frank was disturbed by the tyranny his law school professors tried to impose on students during their first year of law school. During a property class, Frank recalled an instance in which his conservative law and economics professor, bolstered by his course theorems on liability and property rules, posed a question to the whole class.
“He went down every row of over 100 students with that question, and nobody could answer it. He then had the nerve to pick up his books and leave the class! I sat there wondering what made this guy think he could get away with this while we students were paying his salary. I often stewed on who these people thought they were, and I knew I had to get away from them.”
Photo Credit Dave Sanders
After law school, Frank was litigating cutting-edge cases at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and it was there he met countless lawyers like founder and board member Arthur Kinoy who had shaping influences on his life.
“Ironically, Arthur was an extraordinary activist during his years as both a lawyer and later as a professor at Rutgers Law School. I got to know him and developed tremendous respect for him. One day, Arthur told me he was going on sabbatical and asked me if I’d like to fill in for him at Rutgers. The idea of filling in for Arthur Kinoy’s civil rights and civil liberties classes — well, what a start! I’d been at the Center for 5 or 6 years at that point, and that’s the point where many litigators start deciding to segue into academia.”
Frank taught Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at Rutgers for three years in the mornings before work and in the evenings after work from 1986-1989. Frank had already connected with Professors Rhonda Copelon and Rick Rossein, who spoke to him about teaching at CUNY Law. CUNY Law had graduated its first class in 1986, while Frank was at CCR and Rutgers. In 1989, Frank joined CUNY Law’s adjunct faculty and taught a lawyering seminar and Federal Courts until 1994. He went on sabbatical from CCR around that time, and, shortly afterwards, he joined CUNY Law full time.
“I hadn’t been at CUNY for two years when all the workers from CCR went on strike. I actually could see it coming and got out of there just in time! So, I didn’t go to the AALS meat market or bang on doors. I didn’t wine and dine people hoping someone would pick me up — I literally slipped into academia via the back door.”
Frank was drawn to CUNY Law because of its social justice mission and constitution. Haywood Burns was the dean, and Victor Goode was the academic dean, so two African American men were running the institution, which was a first for any law school in history. Rhonda Copelon was engaged in women’s rights work in which Frank sometimes collaborated, and the clinical program was unlike any other program in the rest of the United States.
Frank at Strand Books
CUNY Law recognized at its inception that students needed special training to do any sort of public interest work, and, while doctrinal work was important as a background and basis for understanding law, the real innovations came from people practicing with their feet on the ground.
“There were tremendous innovations with the curriculum, so that people could, in fact, bring their experiences and their practices into the classrooms and law. As far as legal education is concerned, it was revolutionary! I watched it grow from the ground up, as one of my CCR colleagues joined the early faculty, and Dean Haywood Burns was one of the board members at CCR. It was an extraordinary time to delve into legal education, with Legal Theory and Critical Race Theory just emerging, and CUNY Law was the place to be.”
Frank’s most memorable moment of his CUNY Law experience to date is the very first Mississippi Project in 1994. He fondly refers to alum Jaribu Hill ’95 as one of the most extraordinary alums the school has graduated, and proudly joined her and other volunteer students on their first trip. He acknowledges that the work done to establish this project is still as pertinent today as it was at the project’s inception.
“We are reverting back to pre-civil rights times. If you look at those southern states in the Black Belt, voting rights and abortion rights are being eviscerated. We’re seeing white supremacy on the march in those very locations that led to the civil war. You can’t get away from this country’s history. White supremacy emerged from that part of the country, and what’s clear to me now is that much of the fight is still there.
“We’re always going to have to continue to struggle in that part of the country, and I take my hat off to the students who have participated in the Mississippi Project — especially to those who started it. I was proud to be a part of that.”
This revolutionary structure of CUNY Law, of course, brought with it its own set of unique problems. The law is an extremely hierarchical profession where things are done simply because they’ve been done that way for a hundred years. Even if you’re revolutionizing the law, you’re up against the same barriers that were put in place a hundred years ago, like the bar exam. Frank notes that being able to do well on the bar exam was complicated by CUNY Law’s approach to legal education, but, with much thought, experimentation, and change, students succeed on the exam.
Frank does a Q&A on voter rights
This process of “mainstreaming,” or fitting into the mold of other national law schools, was often painful and, in some respects, necessary. CUNY Law is shaped by political forces, as the Board of Trustees is appointed by the Mayor and Governor, who, by controlling funding, can have great influence over curriculums and programs.
He acknowledges that students are angry about racism, never-ending war, and austerity and want to challenge the many obstacles they face.
Frank evokes Fredrick Douglass’ adage of social change arising from struggle when he discusses the harms that students and other community members faced during the past semester. That painful and difficult struggle is necessary to bring real change to the law school.
“Community members who were harmed by racist statements, principles, and practices must respond with activism. There will always be struggle and pain. People are not going to roll over. It’s going to take more than words. Dig in, and be ready for the tough battles ahead.“
Frank continues to find inspiration in students who are emerging from this most recent pandemic crisis and was particularly struck by students who reported in surveys that they couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. He can imagine the way it felt to be stuck in homes that they, in many cases, struggled hard to leave, because he remembers how he struggled to leave home when he was their age.”
Frank dances at his daughter’s Bat Mitzvah
If students walk away from Frank’s classes with only one key takeaway, he asks that students learn to become more effective listeners.
“So many struggles that happen, both interpersonal and major, are a result of people not listening to and absorbing what others are saying and factoring those takeaways into strategies. Even interpersonal struggles are operating on larger levels, so, if you’re missing cues, you’re likely to go astray.”
As for moving forward in a quest for social justice, Frank shares these hopeful words of wisdom with students:
“This may be the most difficult part of students’ lives — what they’re emerging from now — but we still need to hang in there for a little longer. I know they can because I watched them do it this whole pandemic. If we hang in there, we stand to gain huge dividends that could take us out of decades of racism, war, and austerity. People are realizing the mess we’ve been in but are now talking about the real important structural changes that must happen in this country — and we need to be a part of that. Hang in there a little longer, because we can make it get better!”
You can follow Frank on Twitter at @fdeale.