LAFF Society

NEWSLETTER

President's Message, Summer 2015

 

 
I had just sat down to write this Newsletter’s message when I learned of the passing of our colleague and my very dear friend Lynn Walker Huntley after a brief struggle with cancer. 
 
I had last written to Lynn a few months ago at the time of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shootings in Charleston, reminded of her prescient and passionate views of the centrality of the Black church in the community and for the civil rights movement. 
 

At this moment of profound community and national tragedy, I wanted to reach out to her, to savor her counsel, her wisdom, her frustration and her hope. 
 
I did not hear back until recently when Emmett Carson asked me to call him on a personal matter. He was the bearer of a message from Lynn, warm and generous to a fault, telling me that her illness had prevented her from responding and conveying her love and appreciation for my having provided her with the opportunity to work at the Foundation.
 
When I became director of the Human Rights and Governance program at the Foundation in 1981, upon Frank Thomas’s assumption as President, among my first obligations was to hire a program officer to carry forward the Foundation’s emblematic work in support of the civil rights movement. I immediately reached out to the senior leadership in the field, Foundation grantees prominently among them. Elaine Jones at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Jack Greenberg at Columbia Law School both urged me to talk to Lynn, then a civil rights lawyer in the U.S. Department of Justice. 
 
Lynn at first glance did not fit my or the Foundation’s notion of the civil rights activist, appearing at our interviews in a tailored pinstripe suit, her auburn hair loose around her shoulders, her smile, her wit and effervescent charm on full display. Still, her knowledge of the civil rights movement, her sense of needs and direction, her conviction and her singular smarts convinced me that she was clearly the right person for the job. She proved me right time and again, arguing persuasively for core support to the key movement organizations, Black, Hispanic and Native American. 
 
Lynn was driven by a sense of equity and social justice, not by race or ethnicity. At the time, the Foundation had kept a safe distance from religion and politics, but Lynn made a convincing argument for why and how the Foundation could (and should) develop a program in support of the churches’ secular programs. She believed simply in justice and harnessed the Foundation’s resources in support of it. As Director of the Rights and Social Justice program, she participated eagerly in the South Africa programs described in this issue and later directed an innovative study of comparative approaches to race relations in Brazil, South Africa and the United States. 
 
In honor of Lynn and her decades of work in support of civil rights, our editor John LaHoud is undertaking a special edition of the Newsletter on the critical role played by the Foundation in the quest for minority and civil rights. The website and the next Newsletter will contain an obituary detailing Lynn’s remarkable career as clerk to Justice Constance Baker Motley, at the Justice Department, at the Foundation and as President of the Southern Education Foundation. 
 
For me, what counts at this moment is a few reflections on the stunning authenticity of this wonderful woman. What I will remember, beyond her good works, is the basic goodness of the person who fashioned and executed them with humor and flair and a daring, mischievous nature that easily disarmed her doubters. There was a ready repertoire of poetry to be recited, a salacious joke to shock, a favorite song to mellow, the playacting on my couch of a patient in need of psychological counseling—a retinue of behaviors that cut through the patrician nature of the Foundation and reminded us of who we were.
 
Among the bevy of extraordinary people who worked at the Foundation, Lynn Walker Huntley was unique, and I will miss her greatly.
 
Shep Forman

 

 

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