Truman Gibson Jr. - A Connection to Hansberry v Lee, James Burke, and Shelley v Kraemer.
By LaDale Winling
More than once, Truman Gibson, Jr., had ringside seats to history.
In June of 1937, Gibson scored front-row tickets to the heavyweight title bout between Joe Louis and Jim Braddock. His father, Truman, Sr., was an attorney for the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance company in Chicago and had gotten his son tickets to see the crowning of the first Black heavyweight champ since Jack Johnson more than 20 years before.
The bout was held in a ring set up on the field of Comiskey Park on the South Side, and the city’s Black elite were joined by Black business and civic leaders from around the country who traveled to Chicago to see the favored challenger, Louis, take on the unlikely champ, Braddock. Braddock’s story was later immortalized in the Hollywood film Cinderella Man, starring Russell Crowe. The champ knocked Louis down in the first round, offering a respectable defense to his title, but Louis ultimately prevailed with a knockout in the eighth round.
Comiskey Park was the site of the heavyweight championship bout between James Braddock and Joe Louis in June, 1937. Truman Gibson and his father had ringside seats to this fight.
Chicago would soon be the site of another battle freighted with racial significance. Truman Gibson was an attorney and one of the first Black law school graduates of the University of Chicago. He worked with civil rights attorney Earl Dickerson, the UofC’s first Black law school alumnus, who teamed up with Carl Hansberry and Harry Pace to make a legal challenge to racially restrictive covenants, a battle that would go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1940.
Gibson, Jr.’s role in the Hansberry case was to research the covenant’s paperwork – how many property owners signed, how much road frontage their land had, and what proportion of the necessary 95% of area frontage it actually covered. He had been tipped off by James Burke, the embittered former president of the Woodlawn Property Owners Association, that the association had not gathered enough signatures, and Gibson had to prove it. That research and documentation was the fulcrum of the court case in Hansberry v. Lee – it was the basis of the ruling making the South Side covenant inoperative. However, the court sidestepped the fundamental Constitutional question that the Hansberry lawyers raised about all covenants, which would have to wait nearly a decade for other legal challenges, which came together in the cases Shelley v. Kraemer.
Truman Gibson testifying before U.S. Senate committee, 1948
Truman Gibson’s role in covenants challenges was over, but his legal career was just beginning. Gibson met Joe Louis while the boxer was in Chicago, and the two became friendly. After the champ ran up debt during World War II at the hands of his promoter, Gibson became Louis’s manager. As Louis’s fighting abilities deteriorated, Gibson helped found the International Boxing Club in order to crown a successor to the aging heavyweight champ. Louis retired in 1949 and the IBC created an elimination bracket among leading contenders to make a successor as heavyweight champion.
Mr. Truman K. Gibson, Jr., Civilian Aide to the Secretary of War, pictured at press conference Monday, April 9, following his return from Mediterranean and European Theaters of Operations, 04/09/1945 – Public Domain (Wikipedia)
During the war, the Roosevelt administration enlisted Gibson as a racial advisor for the military during World War II. Gibson advised Secretary of War Harry Stimson, helping address problems of discrimination and issues of inequality and mistreatment arising from segregation in the military, such as advocating for more Black officers and supporting their rise through the ranks. In that role, Gibson played a hand in creating the WWII propaganda film, The Negro Soldier, directed by Frank Capra, which positively portrayed the fighting capabilities and the contributions of African Americans.
Truman Gibson lived in metro Chicago and practiced law until his death in 2005. He published his memoir Knocking Down Barriers: My Fight for Black America that same year.