Charles Morgan Jr.

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By the time I joined the American Civil Liberties Union board of directors in 1988, Charles Morgan Jr. had already departed, but his legacy there was larger than life. A native of Birmingham, Ala., the iconoclast, who died Jan. 8 at 78, fought the city's segregationist leaders in the early 1960s. His vigorous condemnation of the 1963 church bombing that killed four young black girls led to the loss of his law practice.

Following that, Morgan opened the ACLU's Atlanta-based Southern Regional Office, which continues today as one of the nation's foremost defenders of voting rights. He notably argued Reynolds v. Sims, a landmark Supreme Court case that ended the rural South's dominance in state politics, and his office challenged the exclusion of blacks from juries and represented black death-row inmates convicted by all-white panels. "The jury box and the ballot box," he said, "are the only places where citizens can tell their government what to do and the government has to listen."

After representing Muhammad Ali during the boxer's appeal of his draft-evasion conviction, Morgan became director of the ACLU Washington legislative office in 1972. The same stubbornness he had shown in Birmingham, though, also led to his departure from the ACLU. After a dispute with the group's leadership over whether his politically charged statements in a news article were clearly identified as personal rather than professional (the ACLU is nonpartisan), Morgan resigned in 1976. It was just another example of his uncompromising, unforgettable zeal.

Herman is president of the ACLU