EUGENE–Oregon lawyers who represented civil rights workers in racially volatile Mississippi during the 1960s are the focus of a special program sponsored by the University of Oregon School of Law.

"Lawyers & Civil Rights–Mississippi in the 1960s" will explore the work of lawyers, including 25 from Oregon, who served in Mississippi with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, an organization chartered in 1963 by President John F. Kennedy to address civil rights abuses in the South.

The program takes place at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 25, in Room 184 of the William W. Knight Law Center, 1515 Agate St. It will include a short film followed by a panel discussion and reception.

"As volunteers, these Oregon lawyers, a third of whom were UO law school graduates, represented civil rights workers in court–a job most Mississippi lawyers were unwilling to do," says Merv Loya, law school assistant dean and a member of the UO Minority Student Program Committee, which is sponsoring the event. "Their work is a reminder of the importance of lawyers in our society and of the positive role they can play. These lawyers helped to make history."

The panel includes former Oregon Supreme Court Justice Jake Tanzer, a UO School of Law graduate now a partner with the Ball Janik firm in Portland; former State Board of Higher Education Chair Les Swanson, a UO law graduate in solo practice in Portland; and Don Marmaduke, a Harvard Law School graduate, now a partner at the Tonkon Torp firm in Portland. Marmaduke was a co-founder of the first public-interest law firm in Oregon in the early 1970s.

The program is one of several sponsored by the UO in commemoration of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday.

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