Corporations Have Civil Rights Too

When a Birmingham church was bombed in 1963 and four black Sunday-school girls were killed, a young white lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr. stood up before the businessmen's club and blamed the entire white community for the crime. Driven out of his town by harassment and death threats, he returned to the South in 1964 as the director of the American Civil Liberties Union Southern Region. He sued for integrated prisons and juries, legislative reapportionment and voting rights, and defended the likes of Muhammad Ali, Julian Bond and Mississippi N.A.A.C.P. Leader Aaron Henry.

So why is Morgan now trying to prove that a big corporation like Sears, Roebuck is being discriminated against in a matter involving Government rules designed to aid blacks and women? Morgan, now 48 and a prospering Washington lawyer, sees no conflict: "There's nothing in the Constitution that says anybody isn't entitled to a defense against discrimination, and in that sense there's no difference between cases involving 'Bull' Connor and blacks, and the EEOC and Sears."

Applying that logic to Sears and the Government the way Morgan does may be novel, but courts have held that corporations do have rights of due process. One of Morgan's tactics has been used by generations of public interest lawyers: if the law is against you, argue broad questions of fairness and attack the harmful social effects of the law. Says Edward Ennis, an A.C.L.U. board member: "I find Chuck's argument extremely imaginative and original, and I'm pleased to see a civil rights lawyer making it."

Other public interest lawyers are not so pleased; one calls Morgan a "moral Houdini." In addition to representing Sears, Morgan is paid a retainer by the Tobacco Institute to argue "smokers' rights." Protests Mark Green, director of Congress Watch, a Nader consumer lobby: "Morgan is using civil liberties as a smokescreen for corporate interests. It's really a bizarre evolution for a public interest lawyer."

Morgan, who now earns an estimated $200,000 a year, appears to have no qualms about speaking out for the rights of corporations. But, then again, he fiercely resists any interference with private rights, whether they belong to blacks, companies--or, for that matter, to Charles Morgan. He quit the A.C.L.U.in 1976 because of the director's objections to his public political comments, writing: "I do not admit the right of any bureaucracy to grant or deny me my rights as a citizen." Most corporate lawyers with a big equal opportunity case on their hands would advise settlement or conciliation. Morgan's move to take Sears' complaint to court, says one civil liberties lawyer, is "bold and unorthodox, but vintage Morgan."

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