Legendary Civil Rights Attorney Julius L. Chambers Was a Member of Alpha Phi Alpha

Did you know that pioneering civil rights attorney Julius L. Chambers, who argued and won some of the most important cases in American civil rights history, was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.? Chambers was initiated as an undergraduate through the fraternity’s Gamma Beta Chapter at North Carolina Central University.

Julius LeVonne Chambers was born on October 6, 1936, in Mount Gilead, North Carolina, and came of age under Jim Crow. As a boy, he watched a white customer refuse to pay his father for auto repair work, and his father could not find a single lawyer willing to sue a white man on behalf of a Black man. That injustice set the course of Chambers’s life, as he resolved to become the kind of lawyer his father could not find.

Chambers pursued that goal with extraordinary discipline. He served as student body president at North Carolina Central University and graduated summa cum laude in 1958. At the University of North Carolina School of Law, he became the first African American editor-in-chief of the law review and graduated first in his class of one hundred students. He later earned a master of laws from Columbia University and, in 1963, was selected by Thurgood Marshall to serve as the first intern for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

In 1964, Chambers opened a law practice in Charlotte that became the first integrated law firm in North Carolina history. From that office, he argued a remarkable series of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court that reshaped the nation, including Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, which upheld busing to desegregate public schools, and Griggs v. Duke Power Co., a landmark ruling against employment discrimination. His work made him a target: his car, his home, and his law office were all bombed, yet he never wavered.

Chambers went on to lead the NAACP Legal Defense Fund as its director-counsel from 1984 to 1993, guiding the nation’s foremost civil rights law organization through battles over education, voting rights, and affirmative action. He then returned home to serve as chancellor of his alma mater, North Carolina Central University, from 1993 to 2001. Julius Chambers died on August 2, 2013, at the age of 76. A stretch of Interstate 85 and a Charlotte high school now bear his name, honoring a life that embodied the Alpha Phi Alpha aims of scholarship and love for all mankind.

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