Because the foundation was a legal entity with tax-exempt status and an organized structure, I saw it as more promising than the alumni association as a vehicle through which we could secure substantial private support. However, the foundation would work in collaboration with the alumni association; the association president was an ex-officio member of the foundation board. Thus, energizing the foundation to launch a major campaign was one of my top priorities. Substantial private money was the key to moving the law school forward. Happily, the board rose to the challenge without hesitation. In the early fall of 1966, it resolved to mount an aggressive capital campaign and adopted an ambitious goal of $1 million. The campaign and the goal were endorsed by the University of Alabama Board of Trustees in November 1966.[6]
Although the foundation’s board included some of the best lawyers in the state, I thought broadening and diversifying its membership would increase its influence and prestige and enable it to reach more funding sources. Two ways to accomplish this were to bring in prominent lawyers who were alumni of other law schools and to include directors from outside Alabama. I thought these moves would also make the board seem less provincial.
To that end, over the next couple of years the board elected as directors: Douglas Arant of Birmingham, Truman Hobbs of Montgomery, and Irving M. Engel of New York, all Yale Law graduates; Marx Leva of Washington, J. Asa Rountree III of New York, Inzer B. Wyatt of New York, and Robert E. Steiner III of Montgomery, all Harvard Law graduates; and Claude E. Hamilton Jr. of New York and Prime F. Osborn III of Jacksonville, Florida, both Alabama law alumni. All of the out-of-state directors had Alabama connections and thus a special interest in helping in this unprecedented campaign to create a superior law school.[7]
In my first years, Sam W. Pipes III of Mobile was president of the foundation. He was succeeded by Edward M. Friend Jr. of Birmingham. Members of the board regularly attended its periodic meetings and tackled the fund-raising challenge with enthusiasm. Foundation leadership rested in its executive committee.[8] Those busy lawyers devoted an extraordinary amount of time to law school concerns. Among them, Howell Heflin—later to become chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court and still later a U.S. senator—deserves special mention. He had been president of the foundation and had just come off a year as president of the Alabama State Bar. He had boundless energy and a deep interest in the law school. During the years of my deanship he spent more time on law school matters than any other alumnus. I marveled over how he could do it along with his law practice in Tuscumbia.
Primary targets of this fund-raising drive were law school alumni and families of deceased alumni. A difficulty we faced was the lack of a long-established tradition of charitable giving in Alabama and the South generally. The devastation of the Civil War and decades of depressed economic conditions had meant that there was little money for such. The situation was in sharp contrast to that in the Northeast where fortunes had been accumulated and private philanthropy was well-established. But since World War II, the South was becoming relatively affluent. Lawyers’ incomes were providing them with discretionary funds that had been rare before the war.
Another difficulty was the widespread view that a state law school should be maintained by the state legislature and that private funding was unnecessary. Overcoming that view and the lack of a philanthropic tradition involved an intensive educational effort. At the numerous bar association meetings and luncheons to which I was invited I took the opportunity to explain why state funds alone were not sufficient. Frank Rose and I stumped the state together with this message, appearing in the six largest cities. Our message had an evangelical fervor. Private funding was necessary to provide a “margin of excellence,” as Virginia Dean Hardy Dillard had put it. The public law schools of greatest distinction in the United States—for example, Virginia and the University of Michigan—relied heavily on private support.
Dr. Rose took me with him to New York to discuss the law school with representatives of the Ford and Carnegie foundations. We laid before them our aspirations for Alabama to become a leader in lifting Deep South legal education and research into the first ranks. But the law school never received a grant from either of those sources.
Otherwise, results from the Law School Foundation’s invigorated efforts were not long in coming. In the previous year, 1965–66, the foundation received $8,900 in contributions. In 1966–67, contributions increased more than seven-fold to $68,000. At the same time, the University-provided funds also jumped, as Dr. Rose had promised. For 1966–67, the law school budget was set at $407,308, compared to $315,501 the year before. These greatly enhanced financial resources from the combination of state and private money gave the school a boost, suggesting that it was on the way to a new level. There was a sense of real momentum.
A fortunate development at this moment was the election of Judge Seybourn H. Lynne as president of the Law School Alumni Association. Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court in Birmingham, Lynne was the most respected legal figure in Alabama. Within the foundation board there arose the idea of asking him, in his capacity as alumni president, to lead a newly organized and energetic annual giving program. We knew that most judges normally would not participate in fund-raising campaigns. But we hoped that with all of the fresh forward movement in the school, he might view this as a special case. I was dispatched to ask him to do this. From my short time in law practice in Birmingham, Judge Lynne and I were acquainted. I had appeared before him in a couple of matters and had met him on a few other occasions. We got along well, and I was one of his many admirers.
We met in his chambers. I updated him on developments in the law school and our aspirations for heightened excellence. I explained our ideas for the annual giving campaign and the reasons for it, saying that we hoped that once it was established it would be a permanent feature of the alumni association. The plan was to appoint a chairman for each class, to solicit his classmates; there would be competition among the classes to see which could produce the highest percentage of contributors. Essentially all we were asking him to do was to sign a letter to all alumni explaining the program and urging them to contribute. At the end of a good discussion, he said, to my great relief and pleasure, “You know my position on fund-raising, but I will make an exception here.”[9]
So with that, we launched the annual giving program in 1967–68. At the end of the year, the class of 1931, with W. Inge Hill of Montgomery as its chairman, came in first with 66 percent of its members participating, an extraordinary level of involvement among institutions of higher education. The widespread regard for Judge Lynne was undoubtedly an important factor in the success of that year. But once organized as it was, the program could carry on effectively into future years. Judge Lynne was succeeded as association president by Oakley W. Melton Jr. of Montgomery (my classmate and third-year roommate).
Another idea advanced at that time came from several former law clerks to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black who were now practicing law in Alabama. They proposed to establish an endowed fund to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of his appointment to the Court. Having myself been a law clerk to Justice Black, I immediately supported the idea. He was the law school’s most prominent alumnus (Class of 1906) and, of course, was nationally known. The hope was that a fund in his name would attract contributions from his admirers all over the country, reaching resources beyond Alabama. This effort was launched in 1967.
My memory is fuzzy on the details, but somehow arrangements were made for a reception in the White House at which the fund’s establishment would be announced. Unfortunately, on the eve of the event President Lyndon B. Johnson had to leave for Germany to attend the funeral of Konrad Adenauer. But the reception went off as scheduled on April 25, 1967,