A Local Life: St. John Barrett, lawyer who made the case for civil rights, dies at 89 - The Washington Post: St. John Barrett was often away from home when his five children were young. He didn’t tell them where he was going or say much about the work he did.
It took years before they learned that during the height of the civil rights movement, their father was traveling throughout the South, helping to define a new branch of the law and attempting to bring an end to segregation.
Beginning in 1955, when he came to Washington, Mr. Barrett was one of the first civil rights lawyers in the government. He was part of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division when it was created in 1957 and had a major role in many celebrated legal landmarks, including the desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High School in the 1950s, James Meredith’s enrollment as the first African American student at the University of Mississippi and the integration of interstate buses by the Freedom Riders of the early 1960s.
