* * *
Shortly after I arrived in Paris, Ghozlan organized a meeting in District 93 of all the Jewish leaders in that community and the chief of police. The tension in the little room was palpable. “You walk into the offices of the [assistant] mayor out here, and what is hanging there but the Palestinian flag,” one Jewish leader said. The chief of police did not respond directly. “We believe we are all equal—churches, mosques, synagogues,” he said. The Jewish leader countered by saying, “It is not the mosques that are being attacked.” The meeting went on for hours as representatives from the Jewish community described the attacks to which they were routinely subjected. Such an event in an American city would likely have been covered in the press, but there was not a single French reporter in the room.
The day Papon, then ninety-two, was let out of prison, I spent the evening with Ghozlan at his house. He was extremely agitated, working two phones at once, dialing ministers and politicians, as he kept up a simultaneous conversation with me. “The mayor of Paris is coming to a demonstration I have organized at Drancy! And the chief of police. And the minister [of integration] Eric Raoult.” He left long messages, giving the time of the demonstration and the names of the journalists he had invited. I had asked to hear him play at a Bar Mitzvah, and while he made and received calls, he projected a video of a party in a hotel ballroom. There he was in his tux, looking like Gilbert Bécaud at the Paramount, invoking old newsreels of cabaret performers during the Vichy era.
The next day I was at the CRIF office with Roger Cukierman when the telephone rang. Cukierman took the call and sounded annoyed. “I won’t go myself, but I’ll send a representative.” When he hung up he said, “A man in the suburbs is organizing a demo.”
“Do you mean Sammy Ghozlan?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “He wants to get his picture in the newspaper all of the time.”
“But isn’t that good?” I asked. “Doesn’t he serve a function by drawing attention to the situation in France?”
Cukierman snapped, “A totally negative function. . . . Whatever the subject, he jumps on it to get his own publicity.”
* * *
By late 2002, some American antiwar intellectuals were strongly criticizing the American Jewish organizations that were trying to call attention to the situation in France. As I left for France, in the fall, Susannah Heschel warned me, “If you write about any of these attacks, you will be used for fund-raising purposes by the Jewish organizations.” Heschel, the chairman of the Dartmouth Jewish Studies Program, is the daughter of the prominent Jewish scholar Rabbi Abraham Heschel. Along with Cornel West and Rabbi Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun, a liberal Jewish magazine, Heschel is a cochair of Tikkun Campus Network, a college movement. By April of this year, however, Heschel, like Rothschild, felt that she had been misled by the lack of proper reporting. “The situation in France reminds me of the Dreyfus case. After he was found innocent, the Jews were blamed for getting him exonerated. . . . There was a clear failure of the French left to respond to Muslim anti-Semitism or to know how to criticize the victims of their own colonialism.” Tony Judt, writing in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, allowed that anti-Semitism is on the rise around the globe, but he cited the ADL’s statistics on the number of reported American incidents, as if to imply an equivalency in the lifestyles of the middle-class American Jewish community and the Jews of the Parisian banlieues.
The interior minister of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, had a clear sense of the terrorist activity in his country. On the Jewish high holy days, Sarkozy visited synagogues in the vicinity of the tony suburb of Neuilly, near the Bois de Boulogne. Sarkozy’s grandfather was Jewish—a figure of speech employed by Jews whose families, terrified for their lives, changed religions before or during World War II. “It is wrong that, fifty years after the Shoah, Jews have to be afraid how they think about Israel,” he said. I followed him that day as he traveled with his wife, who wore a pink Chanel suit, and his deputy minister. Sarkozy was applauded in the tiny meetinghouses called oratoires, where, in the last century, assimilated Jews had gathered. Virtually no mention of his visits appeared in the press.
In February, Sarkozy announced that scores of potential terrorists had been arrested, and in April a Muslim consistoire was established. Many imams in France adhere to fundamentalism, which the demographer Michèle Tribalat and a coauthor have reported extensively on in La République et l’Islam: Entre Crainte et Aveuglement (The Republic and Islam: Between Fear and Blindness). The imams reported to Sarkozy’s representatives that they would tell their followers the first law for Muslims is the religious law. Ghozlan had taken it on himself to try to negotiate with some of the more moderate imams, but certain Jewish organizations in France had put him on warning that he was overstepping his mandate. On the telephone, Shimon Samuels was philosophical when he told me, “Suddenly there are those who rejected Ghozlan in the beginning, but who are seeing that he is effective and what he’s doing is important, and they want to take it over.” If France accepted a role in the coming Middle East war, Samuels added, it would mean that the attacks that had been limited to the banlieues could escalate to bombs going off in supermarkets all over France.
* * *
I stayed in close communication with Ghozlan and Samuels through this past winter and into the spring. As the first bombs landed on Baghdad, Ghozlan was bracing himself for what might come next. He used the word “ratonnade,” and I asked him to define it. “It means that as an immigrant you are being attacked for being a separate identity.” He feared, he said, a sinister new way of life, where people would abandon their common Frenchness and return to medieval tribalism, marooning themselves in their separate religions and ethnic inheritances.
In January, Samuels and the Wiesenthal center announced a special UNESCO conference to address the issue of anti-Semitism—the first such conference in a decade. David de Rothschild offered his house for a reception for the world leaders who would attend. Trying to maintain a cosmopolitan overview, Rothschild told me, “If you fall into a depressed spiral and believe that there is no future and the French state is pro-Arabic, where does that lead but to wrong analysis and desperation?” In early April a new wave of anti-Semitism merged with France’s anti-Israel politics and its outspoken disapproval of America’s war. At demonstrations in Paris, not far from where Clément Weill-Raynal had heard the crowd cry “Death to the Jews” in October 2000, Stars of David were now intertwined with swastikas on banners. Nicolas Sarkozy’s office dispatched marshals in white caps to keep the protests under control, but the new epidemic of violence grew—women clubbed in the street, rocks thrown through a synagogue window, another shul burned. One demonstrator told a reporter for the New York Times, “They are the targets. They are not welcome here because of what they did to our Palestinian brothers.”
Ghozlan’s cell phone rang during a Bar Mitzvah he was attending. “It was a boy attacked during the demo. . . . He had approached a group carrying the Israeli and American flags intertwined with swastikas and told them they were not allowed to do that. . . . They beat him up.” Ghozlan persuaded the young man to go to the police and took him to the Jewish radio station. It was clear that Ghozlan’s dark prophecies had become reality. In the first week of April, Le Monde published a shocking poll, revealing that 30 percent of the French wanted Iraq to win the war. Mecca Cola was selling briskly all over the country, and Jacques Chirac suddenly had a new nickname on playgrounds in the banlieues: King of the Arabs. I had difficulty reaching Ghozlan and Samuels, and when I did, Samuels sounded as morose as Ghozlan had two years earlier. It had become impossible for the opinion-makers of France to distinguish between its NATO allies and Saddam’s terrorists, he said. I mentioned the new poll to him. “You don’t even know the full statistics they published,” he said. “You really want to hear? Total of those disapproving of the American- and British-led intervention in Iraq: 78 percent. The city of Paris: 85 percent. The extreme left: 85 pe
rcent. The extreme right: 48 percent. Asked if they would be more supportive of the war if chemical weapons were used against American and British forces, 52 percent said no. Asked do you hope the U.S. wins, 33 percent said no.”
I mentioned that I had been having trouble reaching Ghozlan. There was a reason, Samuels said; he and Ghozlan had that day decided to open an alternative headquarters in the Maison France-Israël headquarters on the Avenue Marceau, a few blocks from the Arc de Triomphe. Ghozlan’s hotline was still going strong in the banlieues, but it was crucial that they also have a respected presence in central Paris. “The government has endorsed Saddam Hussein as a hero,” Samuels said. “The genie has been let out of the bottle.” The new police station would be one block from the main police headquarters. As American tanks rolled into Baghdad, there were signs that the French situation was not completely irrevocable. The cover story of the French newsmagazine Le Point was headlined: HAVE THEY GONE OVERBOARD?, a reference to the anti-American posturing of Jacques Chirac and his foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin. President Chirac, riding the popularity polls for his intractable opposition to the war, stayed mute even when the citizens of Baghdad openly embraced American forces, but his prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, attempted to redress the balance: “Being against the war does not mean that we want dictatorship to triumph over democracy.”
The last time I spoke on the phone with Ghozlan, he sounded as frenzied as I had ever heard him. He had just learned of a new attack and was rushing to find out the details. In the first three months of this year, he told me, he had verified reports of 326 serious incidents in Paris alone.
JUDGE MOTLEY’S VERDICT
MAY 1994
“She often talked about the South in those days as if it were a war zone and she was fighting in a revolution. No one—be it defendant or plaintiff—was going to distract her from carrying her task to a successful conclusion.”
From time to time when Constance Baker Motley is invited to recall her glory days as an NAACP lawyer in the 1950s and 1960s, she is challenged by law students who think of her as an anachronism, a holdover from a time when it was believed that undoing the pathology between the races could be accomplished largely through the courts. This was the case last October, for example, when Motley, a New York federal judge, spent a week as jurist-in-residence at the law school of the University of Indiana in Bloomington. Motley is popular on the law-school circuit; she and her former colleagues at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund ride a crest of civil-rights-era nostalgia.
On May 17, 1954, when the Supreme Court issued its unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned school segregation, Motley, then a Legal Defense Fund trial lawyer, was thirty-two years old. She was “the girl in the office” then, the drudge, but over ten years she became the only woman at the plaintiff’s table in the Jim Crow South as she and other lawyers tried case after case to enforce the Brown decision; she helped to desegregate lunch counters, schools, and buses, and in those years she also argued ten cases in front of the Supreme Court. In Montgomery, Alabama, she recently recalled, she argued five different appeals in one day as the school boards tried to put off the evil moment of desegregation. In Jackson, Mississippi, a local paper referred to her as “the Motley woman.” She was chided for her fashionable clothes. Her presence in court often brought dozens of spectators, simply to marvel at the fact that a black woman could actually be a lawyer. But the majority of the law students who gathered to hear her at Indiana last October were only vaguely aware of her importance. They weren’t yet born when she traveled from courtroom to courtroom through Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.
A few days before Motley arrived in Indiana, Alfred Aman, the law-school dean, arranged a display of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s achievements in the foyer of the law-school building: Among other items, news accounts of Charlayne Hunter entering the University of Georgia in 1961 and James Meredith desegregating the University of Mississippi the same year were visible in a glass case. The moot-court room at the law school was filled to capacity on the afternoon Motley delivered her lecture. That night, she spoke at a dinner given by the Black Law Students Association, or BLSA. She recalled the many school-desegregation cases that had led to and followed Brown, but after she spoke she was kept busy answering sharp questions about her own experiences, posed by several of the BLSA members: The narrative of Constance Motley’s life seemed to contradict the reality of modem racial politics. “Shouldn’t you have fought for equal schools?” one student asked her, and went on to cite the breakdown in black communities, the black-on-black crime, the miserable test scores, and the loss of pride among black men. “Your generation always used the word ‘mainstream,’ ” another student said, and asked, “What is wrong with black culture?” Motley was brisk with the BLSA students. “I don’t know what black culture is,” she said, as if attempting to camouflage her irritation. When Motley returned to New York, she told me that she had been startled at being asked to defend herself. At this point in her life, she has come to expect, at the very least, a certain degree of respect for what she and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund accomplished. A mistake to fight for integration? The guiding principle of Constance Baker Motley’s life has been her belief that the law is the primary instrument of social reform. “In my early days at the NAACP, I could never have imagined this situation at the colleges today,” she told me.
* * *
A few weeks later, I went to visit Judge Motley at the United States Court House in downtown Manhattan. I took the elevator to the twentieth floor, but Motley was not yet in her chambers; she was in court, hearing pretrial motions on a case that involved the alleged mistreatment of a Black Muslim by prison officials.
The decor of Motley’s chambers was very feminine, with floral chintz curtains and pink walls. Judge Motley’s law clerk had left a stack of faded newspapers for me on the conference table. A headline on the top paper, a copy of the September 11, 1963, New York Times, read “WALLACE ENDS RESISTANCE AS GUARD IS FEDERALIZED; MORE SCHOOLS INTEGRATE.” The news story described the events of the previous day, when, after months of resistance by Governor George Wallace, the schools in Birmingham and two other Alabama cities were integrated. It told of a blonde high-school girl in Birmingham who had cried when she learned that black children were enrolled in her school. “I hope my momma heard, so she’ll come get me,” she said. The Times correspondent in Birmingham related that seventy-five youths had shouted, “Keep the niggers out!” “Go home!” and “Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate!” I flipped through the stack of newspapers. In one, I saw a photograph, snapped in the hallway of the federal courthouse in Birmingham in 1962, that showed Motley wearing a fashionable black coat and matching hat and an elegant printed scarf. She was looking down at the floor, as if to distance herself from the mob, but she did not look particularly afraid; in fact, she appeared oddly serene.
There was also an envelope of documents referring to Constance Motley that went back as far as fifty years. They included the expected awards letters and banquet menus, and some unexpected examples of the way she handled her anger: Motley had kept a copy of every complaint she filed with the Taxi and Limousine Commission about drivers who failed to pick her up. (”Complainant, who is a Negro, charged that respondent discriminated against her . . . because of complainant’s color.”) Then I came to a single-spaced letter signed “Anthropologist”:
Mrs. MOTLEY: When you made your plea before Judge Tuttle, how many windows did you raise to let your stinking body odor escape? How much cologne did you use to saturate your clothing with to prevent others from smelling your stinking body? . . . It is hard to see how any person with an ounce of brains would get up and argue that the nigger is equal to other races. It just is not so.
As I finished the letter, Judge Motley walked into the room. I asked her about the letter, and she told me she could hardly remember receiving it. “I used to get letters like that all the time. I
wonder why I even kept it,” she said.
* * *
Constance Baker Motley is seventy-two years old. When she was admitted to Columbia Law School, in 1943, her photograph ran in a rotogravure for African-Americans, and she was held up as a role model. “She’s one of the few Negro women enrolled in Columbia University’s famous School of Law,” the caption noted. As time passed, she became the first African-American woman to be a New York state senator, a borough president (Manhattan), a federal judge. Judge Motley is tall and large-boned, but she has delicate features and dainty hands and feet. She is judicial, formal, precise. Unlike many of the civil-rights activists of her generation, she is far more comfortable discoursing on the history of the Fourteenth Amendment than delivering an impassioned speech. Given what she has been through, her dry, legalistic demeanor may be her most remarkable achievement. She has been in jail cells with Martin Luther King, Jr., where the air was so foul that she became faint; she spent long nights in Birmingham churches singing freedom songs; she stayed with Medgar Evers, and, under armed guard, in the Birmingham home of a Legal Defense Fund attorney whose house was repeatedly bombed during the fifties and sixties; racist insults have been hurled at her by white lawyers. Yet, for all this, her memories tend to be a lawyer’s memories. She focuses on the method by which school integration was actually achieved, the litigation strategies, the motions and sustaining orders, the quashing of subpoenas, the emergency appeals. It was her knowledge of the law that enabled her to transcend the emotionalism of the Jim Crow courts. In her 1992 memoir, In My Place, Charlayne Hunter-Gault recalls sitting with Constance Motley at the plaintiff’s table in a Georgia courtroom during her attempt to enter the University of Georgia: “She barely acknowledged my presence . . . I never, for example, heard her laugh in the presence of any state or university officials, except as a barely masked form of sarcasm. It seemed as if this was the most important mission in her life. In fact, she often talked about the South in those days as if it were a war zone and she was fighting in a revolution. No one—be it defendant or plaintiff—was going to distract her from carrying her task to a successful conclusion.”
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