May his memory be a blessing

My brother-in-law, Drew Days, died in the early hours of this morning. He was a man of many distinctions: Yale Law School graduate and professor, NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyer, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the Carter Administration, Solicitor General of the United States in the Clinton Administration, board member of his alma mater Hamilton College, “of counsel” at Morrison and Foerster, board member of the MacArthur Foundation, and–one of his favorite functions–a Proprietor of Common and Undivided Lands at New Haven (i.e. the New Haven Green).

Our professional paths only occasionally crossed. I knew him in other ways. He was four years ahead of me and in my older brother’s class at New Rochelle High School when I first fell for his younger sister, Jackie Days. He knew how to have a good time as a not too serious student at Hamilton. Until this year, he stayed in touch with and met every summer with his Hamilton roommates. He worked harder at Yale Law, but also sang tenor and did his share of carousing with the Yale Russian Chorus, where he met Ann Ramsay Langdon. Her joining the Peace Corps precipitated marriage, at the Yale chapel of course, in 1967, when I was graduating from Haverford.

Off they went, first to Puerto Rico for training and Spanish language class, then to Honduras, where Drew tried to put together a tomato canning coop, if I remember correctly. Two years later they were back in NYC, where Drew signed on with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to focus on school desegregation throughout the South. He was surprised and tickled when Attorney General Griffin Bell asked him to run the Civil Rights Division. Ann and his by now two daughters, Alison and Elizabeth, moved to DC not long before Jackie and I took off for my first Foreign Service posting in Rome.

Drew was unsparing in his enforcement of civil rights laws. His parents had moved to New Rochelle from Tampa to give their children better opportunities in an integrated environment. Drew rarely complained about any racial slights directed at himself, but he was determined to prevent discrimination from blocking the education, voting rights, employment, and opportunities of others. “Color blind” was not his goal. He was convinced the United States suffered from systemic racism well before it got that moniker and therefore believed affirmative action of many different sorts was required to overcome it.

A popular professor at Yale, Drew established the Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for Human Rights at its law school, but he declined to move into the dorms to be “master” of one of the colleges. He laughed at the title. But then again, Drew laughed a lot. He had a wry, sometimes biting, sense of humor, though many didn’t know it as he was impeccably polite and respectful even to those he found overbearing or foolish. There were of course some of those at Yale, but Drew loved the place and its people. One of the only times I saw him a bit shaken was when he feared he might not get tenure, hard as that is to believe in retrospect.

Drew enjoyed his challenging time as Solicitor General, a job made for his talents. But he felt he lost too many cases, including one in which the Senate voted later 99-1 against the position he had taken in a pornography case. He was still convinced, however, that his position was right. That and other adversities never prevented us from enjoying his and Ann’s company, along with our two sons and their two daughters, both in Washington and summers in Little Compton, Rhode Island, where his mother-in-law owned a house. Drew was a strong swimmer and would dare go much farther than I did in rough water. His self-confidence was almost always justified.

Drew also enjoyed his post-government life. He never tired of teaching at Yale, though he was chagrined when I taunted him a bit about all the conservative lawyers and judges the school managed to produce. His “of counsel” lawyering often brought him to DC, where his sister and I were always ready for a dinner out with him. We all hoped he would be appointed to the Supreme Court, but that possibility faded with age, as the Republicans taught everyone that appointing younger jurists was smarter: they carried less baggage into confirmation hearings and were likely to last longer on the Court.

It was a few years ago that Drew, who had suffered from small strokes, told us over dinner at Woodward Table that he had been diagnosed with dementia. I’m not a big hugger, but I gave him a big hug and assured him we’d all be supporting him as he faced this last challenge. We’ve managed a few visits in DC or New Haven every year during his decline, which has been painful to watch and no doubt more painful to experience. He died peacefully during the night, with his devoted wife Ann and younger daughter Liz close by.

May his memory be a blessing,

PS: Here is Drew as Solicitor General of the United States, 1995: