(Editor’s Note: Across Michigan is a new column that will look behind the headlines at interesting people,politics, and events in our state, and occasionally perhaps, elsewhere.)
DETROIT – He went down to Mississippi with Martin Luther King Jr. to register black people to vote, at a time when that could get you killed. He represented the family of Viola Liuzzo, the white woman murdered by the Klan,when they sued the government.
He looked like Mark Twain, had an eye for the ladies, a hatred of injustice and loved a good legal fight. Even when he was in his 90s, Dean Robb was always up for a battle, especially if it involved someone being treated unfairly for the color of their skin.
He helped found the first integrated law firm in the country; fought a million battles, won some, and stayed cheerful to the end. He loved beautiful women, married some, and finally found his perfect match in Cindy, who was just slightly younger than his oldest child.
Sometimes he seemed to delight in being outrageous. Yet he was a farm boy from Lost Prairie, Illinois to the core, whose mama worried he would turn his back on Jesus, even as he went down to Cuba to see Fidel Castro back when Americans weren’t supposed to do that. In his later years, he often did a great impersonation of Mark Twain, sometimes to raise money for good causes.
“I guess I was an unlikely radical, all right,” he told me chuckling, sitting in his pajamas in his Detroit apartment one afternoon after Thanksgiving. He had come down from his home up north, in Suttons Bay, to have two heart valves replaced. The surgeons had no trouble with the first one.
But when they went to do the second two weeks later, it proved impossible. His heart, and the hole in it, was too large.
“Rotten luck,” the unlikely radical sighed.
Dean Robb:An Unlikely Radical, was, in fact, the title of the biography his youngest son, Matt, wrote about his dad, a man whose heart was big indeed – and who got a twinkle in his eye at just the thought of tweaking the establishment’s tail.
He had come to Detroit after World War II to become a Presbyterian minister, until he decided law was the way to change society, and enrolled at Wayne State University law school.
Dean was a brilliant student, and threw himself both into his studies and Progressive Party politics. He was as white as an Illinois farm boy could be, but he was determined to do all he could to stand up for black Americans. He was never a Communist, though he stoutly defended their rights, even during the worst of the Red Scare.
Not long before he graduated, the law school dean called him into his office, praised his abilities, but added,“There is no future in law for radicals. You have to get along with the power structure.”
Dean Robb spent the rest of his life proving him wrong. When he graduated, he joined the first integrated law firm in the nation. “Defending the defenseless and oppressed was my passion in law. Hell, still is!” he told me half a century later.
He fought for integration, for open housing; at the very end of his life, he was fighting to get justice for a young man who had been electrocuted swimming in a Traverse City marina.
Robb put justice above any other quality; when he felt that another lawyer who was a lifelong friend had mishandled his part of that case, he sued him too. He could be a pit bull when necessary.
Probably his most famous, most sensational and most successful case was one he technically lost. The world had known that Viola Liuzzo, a39-year-old Detroit homemaker inspired by the civil rights cause, had gone to Alabama to help drive folks back from the famous Selma to Montgomery trek on March 25, 1965, and was ambushed and assassinated by the Ku Klux Klan.
What wasn’t widely known was that there was an FBI informant in the assassin car, Gary Thomas Rowe, a brutal man who had beaten up civil rights demonstrators, and who did nothing to stop the killing.
Dean Robb sued the federal government on behalf of the Liuzzo family in 1983, and exposed that and other shocking details in the trial, including proof that J. Edgar Hoover had deliberately tried to smear Liuzzo; indeed, those conducting her autopsy seemed most interested in finding out whether she was taking drugs and having sex with marchers; she hadn’t, in fact done either.
U.S District Judge Charles Joiner ruled against the family in the end, finding there was no evidence that the FBI had plotted in any kind of conspiracy against the murdered woman.
“I don’t care what he said. Dean gave us our mother’s reputation back,” her son, Tony Liuzzo, told me many years later.
Dean Robb always felt that ruling was one more miscarriage of justice. Soon after I saw him, he got two calls from Ralph Nader. “Dean – you’ve got to write all this stuff down!” he told his old friend.
But the time for that had run out. Surrounded by his family, Dean Robb died on the afternoon of Dec. 2, a“visualize impeachment” button pinned to his pajamas.
His youngest son, Matt, who decided to become a lawyer like his dad after flirting with a career as a golf pro, is working on plans to finish telling his father’s story, perhaps in a multi-media way.
“What Dean wanted most was to be a good neighbor to all of his fellow human beings, and to see us treat each other with love, kindness and respect,” said Matt. His father won’t have a grave.
Being who he was, he donated his body to a medical school. But I’d have to say his son’s words are a mighty fine epitaph.
(Editor’s note: A version of this column appeared earlier in the Toledo Blade.)
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