By Robert J. Hansen | OBSERVER Staff Writer

Nathaniel Colley, one of California’s leading Black pioneers in law, education and the fight against discrimination in housing and public life, was recalled and honored by some of Sacramento’s brightest Black legal lights last month.

Over three recent Mondays, Black judges, prosecutors, public defenders, law enforcement officials, educators and historians – including Colley’s grandson, himself a lawyer – spoke of Colley’s impact on Sacramento and their own lives at McGeorge School of Law in Oak Park.

Ming v. Horgan, Colley’s landmark case, was sent to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Sacramento’s first Black attorney persuaded the court that those who used any federal funding to create housing could not engage in discrimination. He also fought successfully for the repeal of Proposition 14, which in 1964 had nullified California’s 1963 Rumford Fair Housing Act outlawing all types of housing discrimination based on race, ethnicity or religion.

“Given what we’re seeing in today’s politics, remembering Nathaniel Colley is even more relevant and crucial,” said Shanae Buffington, president of the California Association of Black Lawyers.

The series, co-sponsored by the California Association of Black Lawyers, the Sacramento County Bar Association, and the Wiley Manuel Bar Association, was held Oct. 30 and Nov. 6 and 13.

Building The Practice

Born in 1918 in Carlowville, Alabama, Colley graduated from Tuskegee Institute in 1941 and served in World War II, where he was promoted to Army captain.

He enrolled at Yale University Law School in 1946, graduated with honors and won the Benjamin Sharp Prize for best original essay by a third-year law student.

Colley and his wife, Jerlean, moved to Sacramento in 1948, where she had family. He joined the NAACP and quickly became its western regional council. Colley won his first case against discrimination when a Sacramento County Superior Court judge forbade the Sacramento Housing Authority from discriminating against Sacramentans based on race.

A letter Colley wrote to the Sacramento Bee that never was published gives a clear picture of what African Americans experienced in Sacramento when Colley and his wife moved here:

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“Dear editor, the year on this is July 22, 1948. Allow me to tell you and your readers What may seem at first an unbelievable story.

“The other day, my wife and I went to the market to buy our weekly groceries. At the meat counter, we ordered a choice of round steak but to our amazement and horror, the butcher informed us that the particular cut of meat that we wanted was restricted. These were his words.

“‘I hate to have to say this, but you see I am not the boss. It’s out of my control. All of the meat in this counter is restricted. Down at the counter near the rear door, you will find a wonderful assortment of ends and scraps. The fellow there will be more than glad to wait on you,’ the butcher said.

“‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it is true that steak is expensive but it just so happens we have the money to buy one piece at least, we do not care for ends and scraps.’ ‘But you don’t seem to understand,’ said the butcher. ‘It is neither a matter of price nor money. It’s like this, so long as you are a Negro you take the ends and the scraps or go hungry. Or what would our white customer think if we were to be caught serving steak to a Negro?’

“Then my wife interposed, ‘But my husband served two years in the South Pacific as captain in the army. He won three battle stars and a unit citation and besides, both my husband and I hold BS degrees from Tuskegee Institute. My husband is a prize-winning graduate of the Yale University of Law in the class of June 1948 yet, we must eat the ends and scraps or go hungry?’

“‘That’s right,’ said the butcher. It’s like this pure and simple if you’re Negro, the steaks are restricted no matter who you are. If you’re white, you can buy them no matter who you are. Hitler, Stalin or Joe Bum.’

“We left with neither steaks nor scraps but to this day, we are not sure whether our parting words should have been ‘Hail Hitler’ or ‘God bless America.’ You say it can’t happen in Sacramento. I dare you to paint your face black and try to buy a house.

“Sincerely and yours,

“Nathaniel Colley”

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“He could not have known in 1948 the impact his work would have on all of us,” said Amreet Sandhu, one of the speakers and the bilingual outreach and training librarian at the Sacramento County Law Library.

Sandhu said that when Colley started his career, he took smaller cases that may not have been high profile but still were important. One was on behalf of a woman denied use of a Land Park swimming pool. Colley won a settlement for his client and the swimming pool closed, Sandhu said.

“They would rather go out of business than integrate their swimming pool,” Colley was quoted at the time.

His grandson Gary Lindsey Jr., an assistant city attorney in Sacramento, said it was hard for his Yale-educated Black grandfather to find a job here.

Lindsey Jr. said his grandfather once applied to the California Department of Justice. While waiting in the lobby, the secretary asked whether he knew he needed a law degree. Though Colley had graduated Yale law with honors, the DOJ wouldn’t consider him.

“That was the state of California at the time,” Lindsey Jr. said. “That’s how he ended up in a warehouse packing boxes.”

Colley’s only path to becoming a lawyer in Sacramento was to open his own practice. When he did, it represented a huge breakthrough for Blacks, who now had someone they could turn to, said Chris Lango, producer of “The Time is Now: Nathaniel Colley” as seen on KVIE.

“His work never stopped,” Lango said. “When Nathaniel Colley arrived in Sacramento, many institutions were segregated. When he was able to open up his law practice, the question was where was he going to open it.”

Lango said few of the buildings Colley practiced in locally still exist. One of his offices was where Macy’s on K Street is.

“All three [offices] were victims of redevelopment,” Lango said. “All of the physical spaces that Colley worked for the first 18 to 20 years of his life in Sacramento, there’s no evidence that they ever existed.”

Colley’s former office at 1810 S Street is currently owned by the Sacramento Black Chamber of Commerce. The building is a historic landmark in the city of Sacramento. Built in 1967, the office was designed by James C. Dodd, the first licensed Black architect in Sacramento. Dodd was commissioned to design the building by Colley.

Activist Attorney

Before Brown v. Board of Education and the March on Washington that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Colley was fighting against racist history books and housing discrimination.

Colley needed a social organization to back him in his work and that organization was the NAACP, historian Clarence Caesar said. “That organization would be the backbone for all the cases he would take on behalf of African Americans,” Caesar said.

Colley’s first landmark case was against the Sacramento Housing Authority for making only 16 of its then 310 units available for Black people.

“He had to lead the effort to decertify or get rid of the city’s housing policy and through the lawsuit that was filed by NAACP he was able to secure a stay that was segregating these Black residents. That case set the standard for future cases,” Caesar said.

Al Brown Sr. a trustee with the Sacramento County Office of Education and Colley’s son-in-law, shared Colley’s words on the legal right to fair housing:

“Our experiences lead us to believe that … the law already vests the executive branch of the government with ample authority to justify the use of the presidential thumb on the scale of justice in order to ensure that it always tilts in favor of and never against equality of treatment in housing. Even though its practice seems to be in clear contrast to the Constitution, racial segregation is one of the forms that is practiced in hundreds of low-rent housing projects throughout the nation. These projects are run by public housing authorities, established in the National Housing Act of 1949. Essentially this is a federal program.”

Colley fought for racial justice to the end. Robert Harris, attorney and former president of the National Bar Association, worked on a case with Colley in which the San Francisco Police Officers Association sued the NAACP for complaining about police brutality.

Every time the NAACP filed a police brutality complaint, police filed countersuits for defamation of character against the NAACP in hopes the organization did not have enough resources to defend against defamation, Harris said. “We decided that we would defend those cases, and we did.”

From 1978 to 1984, Harris was in constant contact with Nat Colley during that litigation.

Colley and Harris were unwavering in their defense of the NAACP and its fight against police brutality, even when other police associations joined the lawsuits against the NAACP.

Harris eventually successfully argued to have the defamation lawsuits dismissed “to the surprise of just about everybody,” he said.

The fight against police brutality and misconduct now spans Rodney King, Mike Brown, George Floyd and Sacramentans Stephon Clarke, shot to death in his grandmother’s yard March 18, 2018, and Tyre Nichols, who died Jan. 10 this year after being beaten three days earlier by five Memphis police officers.

Al Brown Jr. recalled his grandfather’s reaction to seeing the Rodney King incident in 1991. “He was just emotional and said ‘This is not done,’ referring to his work,” he said.

Colley died in 1992, a year after King’s beating by Los Angeles officers.

Forging A Legacy

There are many ways to carry Colley’s work forward, from educational equality to preserving historic locations and documents in the fight for racial equality.

Nathaniel Colley Jr., who followed in his father’s legal footsteps, said honoring his father’s legacy is not about what you say or write down but what you do. “The idea of carrying forward is getting out and getting more people to take up the cause,” he said. “Our freedom and equality is your freedom and equality. Spread the pie and try to bring in more allies.”

He said that not only was his father the only Black attorney in Sacramento at the time, but the only non-white one. “So what happens? All these Mexican farmers would come to Dad. And many times he would come home with bags of goods that the farmers had harvested from their fields to pay him,” Colley Jr. said.

Former Sacramento Chief of Police Daniel Hahn said Colley paved the way for him and many of the judges and attorneys he knows. “Me being the first African American chief of police in Roseville and my hometown of Sacramento … was really because of the work Nathaniel Colley did,” he said.

Hahn said when he moved to Oak Park in the ’70s, he thought drug dealing and crime came with the territory. “I thought Oak Park always was and would be like this,” Hahn said. “Largely because I did not know the history of Oak Park.”

Hahn said that honoring Colley’s legacy comes down to education, “and not just about Colley but all the things that we were not taught.”

Sandhu, the librarian, said the buildings Colley fought for minorities to have equal access to helped her family have a place to live, which still benefits them today. “The housing projects are still there and are relevant for many different reasons,” she said. “I think we need to fight hard to preserve this legacy here.”

U.S. District Court Judge Troy Nunley said he is the embodiment of the civil rights movement and is one of the people who Colley fought for “to have rights to go into the grocery store and not be profiled as someone who was going to steal.”

Judge Nunley said Sacramento’s diverse communities coming together is one way to honor Colley. “We can keep it going by keeping us aware,” he said. “I come away from events like this enlightened, and what we need to keep doing is exactly what we’re doing here today.”

Nunley said that Kimberly Mueller, chief judge for the U.S. Eastern District, plans to honor Colley with exhibits at the 9th Judicial Circuit Historical Society.

Sam Jackson, retired Sacramento city attorney, said society can’t just tolerate racism wherever it lives. “If we want to get beyond, take what Nat Colley has done, get beyond where we’ve been and where we are now,” he said. “There is one word in our vocabulary that we have to lose as it relates to human relations and that word is ‘tolerance,’” Jackson said. He suggested a better word: acceptance.