One of the earliest calls for help went out to Fay. She rushed over. The student in charge, Milton Hare, had no idea who had called this pony-tailed, Leftist attorney. She looked under thirty, dressed like a student in a pale cotton work blouse and pants. Her skin glowed. Fay appeared like a ray of sunshine — beautiful, warm and knowledgeable. Everybody at Legal Central secretly fell in love with her. Milton said, “You couldn’t help it.”
Milton and Fay started making phone calls and got almost forty lawyers to offer free representation to the arrestees. Fay then tracked down the whereabouts of the arrested women being held in an armory south of the Oakland airport. When they got word that Santa Rita was ready to release the arrestees on bail, Milton had been awake for at least forty hours. He and Fay gathered up the paperwork, Milton borrowed a co-worker’s Volkswagen and Fay hung on white-knuckled and silent while Milton drove like a maniac. (Running another errand, later in December, Milton totaled that same car and was sidelined with injuries.)
The Santa Rita jail was surrounded by barbed wire. It had previously been an army installation and appeared quite intimidating. When they arrived at the entrance gate, Fay took charge. She opened her billfold for the guards, reached past Milton, stuck it out the driver’s window and said, “We’re lawyers for the Berkeley arrestees.” They were waved through. This ploy worked at other checkpoints, including the main reception desk. Fay and Milton were permitted to speak for half an hour to a large crowd of unwashed, sleep-deprived students in a sparsely furnished detention room. While Bob Treuhaft remained fuming in a nearby isolation cell, Fay explained the bail bond process and assured the arrestees they would be released promptly. A week after the demonstrations, negotiators reached an agreement with the administration. The university backed down. Political speech would be permitted on campus starting January 4, 1965.
After Fay moved to a larger Berkeley apartment, she decided to hold a Seder for SNCC friends at her home. She incorporated into it references to Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement. Jewish activists had, by then, been in the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement for decades, empathizing with blacks because of shared histories of bigotry, slavery and violent death. That spring of 1965 Fay was more upbeat than she had been in several years. Despite Marvin’s involvement in a serious relationship with another woman, he and Fay maintained strong ties through their political activities and shared parenting of Neal and Oriane. By then, Fay had gotten over Stanley Moore. When Marvin began to talk more seriously about divorce, Fay campaigned hard to win Marvin’s return and prevailed. One spring day, she excitedly burst into Barney Dreyfus’s office to announce that she and Marvin were getting back together.
The Stenders celebrated their reunion by leasing a house on Grant Street in the Berkeley flats that had previously belonged to a friend in the Guild. It was the one Fay would still occupy when she was shot in 1979. Located in an area her parents had always looked down upon, the gray, two-story, five-bedroom house was not stylish and had no central heating. But it stood in a sociable, biracial neighborhood and came with an affordable purchase option. Fay loved the plum tree in the front yard.
The Stenders wasted no time making their new living room a gathering place for Leftist friends, galvanized by the escalating Vietnam War. Holding meetings at home was far easier on Fay. Her kids could simply go in and out. Potluck barbecues at the Stenders were the norm long before most people considered the idea. Fay rarely cooked and felt little urge to clean her cluttered house before inviting friends over.
That summer of 1965, Peter Franck and fellow civil rights activist Aryay Lenske had an idea for a new project they discussed over breakfast with Marvin and Fay and a few other young Turks from the local Guild. Franck had begun handling conscientious objector cases under the tutelage of Frances Heisler, who had been among the first lawyers to take such cases during World War II. Now in semi-retirement, the Austrian-born pacifist resided in the wealthy coastal town of Carmel. Heisler had a rich friend who offered to help bankroll Franck’s proposal to set up an umbrella organization to oversee the defense of draft resisters and other anti-war demonstrators. Fay and Marvin suggested expanding legal assistance from just representing draft resistors to include the Movement’s wide range of social and political causes. Over the Stenders’ breakfast table, the gathered friends gave the proposal the ambitious title “Council for Justice” and considered who else to recruit.
The CFJ would be run by an executive committee. With proper coordination, they could avoid repeating past mistakes in discrimination suits against the Sheraton Palace and Auto Row in San Francisco and the Free Speech Movement (FSM) case in Berkeley. One of their members, Beverly Axelrod, had almost gone bankrupt in aggressively defending the San Francisco protest prosecutions the year before. In the FSM case, Axelrod and lead counsel Mal Burnstein had opted instead for a judge trial, greatly surprising prosecutor Lowell Jensen. Peter Franck had assisted the defense, biting his tongue as a lawyer too green to voice his serious misgivings about the decision to waive a jury. The grueling trial lasted most of the summer of 1965, drew little public attention and resulted in the judge imposing some heavy sentences. The lawyers vowed never to forego a jury again in a political case.
The original aim of the Council for Justice was to provide legal support for the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC), formed earlier that year by two anti-war activists. Co-chairs Jerry Rubin and Robert Hurwitt hoped to launch the world’s largest anti-war demonstration, convinced that by dramatically increasing the visibility and numbers of those opposing the war, they might force withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Vietnam.
A thirty-six-hour VDC teach-in held in May 1965 had already put Berkeley “on the war-protest map”7 with total attendance exceeding 35,000 people. The CFJ executive committee made a detailed plan of action assigning different roles to various lawyer volunteers. Marvin was designated as “bail central” — the source whom lawyers stationed at the jailhouses would consult to arrange for bail money. Fay would play the safer role of dispatcher, along with Guild lawyer Al Brotsky.
On the date of the march, more than ten thousand demonstrators walked without incident until they were attacked by Hell’s Angels near the Oakland border. Jerry Rubin and his fellow planners wanted to mount an even larger parade in late November. Fay and Marvin helped prepare a complaint challenging Oakland’s denial of a permit, which Peter Franck and Barney Dreyfus then successfully pursued in federal court. The resulting late November march from the Berkeley campus to DeFremery Park in North Oakland drew the largest crowd yet to engage in an anti-war rally in the entire Bay Area. Flush with success, VDC planned more protests for 1966.
Source: Peter Franck
Fay’s former law partner Peter Franck. (Photo circa 1981.)
As a Cal undergraduate in 1957, Peter Franck helped found SLATE, the first Progressive campus political party to emerge in the Cold War era. SLATE brought the world’s issues to campus, opposing discriminatory housing, the nuclear bomb, the death penalty, and HUAC persecutions. In 1964, as a new attorney, Franck represented leaders of the Free Speech Movement. Then the Stenders invited him to join the San Francisco Lawyers Guild board, where he led young Turks prodding the Guild to become more activist. In 1965, Franck began representing the rock band “Country Joe and the Fish,” launching his long, successful career in entertainment law. That same year, he and Aryay Lenske cofounded the Council for Justice over breakfast at the Stenders.
Meanwhile, a major new opportunity surfaced for the Council for Justice. From 1962 to 1965, labor leader Cesar Chavez had organized farm workers in Tulare County in the Central Valley of California, assembling a large union with the help from outside activists. Through Frances Heisler, Chavez soon approached Peter