by Richard Prior
Staff Writer
“May you live in interesting times,” goes the proverb.
Bill Maness understands the blessings and curses that come with doing just that.
These days, Maness said, he’s “that old white-haired man walking the streets all the time.”
But in days gone by, he was on the forefront of what were probably the two defining events of the 20th Century: World War II and the Civil Rights movement.
Maness actually doesn’t walk the streets much these days. Odds are he never did. He practically jogs around them, in and out of his office on the eighth floor of the old Barnett Bank building on West Adams Street.
The building itself maintains a sort of Old World charm. It also occasionally throws an inconvenience the tenants’ way when the air conditioner needs CPR or the heating system is taking a break or the elevator seems to be wheezing its last gasp.
“So many things have outrun me,” Maness said in his office, the walls covered with plaques, the bookshelves stacked with old law volumes. “I’m not computer literate. I can do old-fashioned research, but that takes a lot of time.
“Then you’re not always certain that the old-fashioned research is the best that can be done.”
He continues to come to his downtown office seven days a week for no other reason than he feels he has to.
“I’m trying to hold onto the clients I’ve had who have come in needing help because of something new that’s occurred in their life,” he said. “I don’t want to close my office and have people that have counted on me all these years come in, and I’m not here.
“You don’t know. They might need an old file or some counsel or advice in old age that they didn’t need back yonder.
“I just feel obligated to keep practicing.”
Other tenants surrounding Maness’s law offices are leaving the building, in search of more modern accommodations. He is reluctant to leave his comfortable rooms, made cozy with photos, paintings, a handful of awards and assorted memorabilia collected across the years.
That in itself is a clue into the habits of Bill Maness, former State legislator, former Circuit Court judge, former attorney for the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad and enduring private practice lawyer who won’t abandon his old clients.
He doesn’t throw anything away.
For a man who will be 87 on Dec. 16, that’s a lot of stuff to accumulate.
Examples abound in his books: “Dear William: The Yeast Is There,” “This Was My Life” and “I’m Doing The Best I Can.” Newspaper clippings, pictures, samples of cross-examinations, position papers, letters and samples of poems he has written over the years.
Proceeds from the sale of his books benefit his beloved alma mater, Elon College, between Greensboro and Durham, N.C.
These are not haphazard scraps pieces of memory, significant only for the broad span of time they cover. They make up the lines and chapters of a vibrant history. And Bill Maness has been a busy man.
He served two terms in the State Legislature and was a Circuit Court judge for five years. He resigned from the bench when he realized he couldn’t tend to a family of five on $18,500 a year.
He landed a good position as attorney for the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad . . . and lost it after he gave a speech that supported striking teachers.
He later became the attorney for the Duval Teachers Association.
He also successfully sued the Duval County School Board, requiring it to reinstate “the best French teacher in the county,” a black man who had been fired for refusing to shave his goatee.
He argued and won a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court case involving a movie projectionist who was cited for showing a movie that contained brief shots of breasts and buttocks.
He successfully represented William Kuntsler, whose speech at the Convention Center had been blocked by the City.
He took positions that would appear contradictory until the foundation was examined. And the foundation, inevitably, was “fairness.”
He brought the first black lawyer to the previously all-white Jacksonville Bar Association luncheon. Leander Shaw Jr. later rose to a judgeship in the First District Court of Appeals and became chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court.
He pushed for the integration of public accommodations in Jacksonville in 1964 because it wasn’t fair to exclude black people.
He also represented Warren Folks, a self-styled leader of the KKK, who was charged with inciting a riot. Twenty-five lawyers turned Folks down before Maness took, and won, the case based on First Amendment principles.
As a young man, Maness was familiar, if not entirely comfortable, with the dictates of “separate but equal.” Some practices would have been laughable, if violating them hadn’t been dangerous.
The town of Gibson, N.C., is just above the South Carolina border. It was one of the towns that Maness’s father served as a circuit-riding Methodist minister.
“They had benches on the street in downtown Gibson that said ‘White Only,’” Maness recalled. “There was a big tree between some stores downtown. When they cut the tree down, that stump was big. Big as this table. And they put ‘White Only’ on the stump.
“Think of it. A black man couldn’t even sit on a stump in downtown Gibson, N.C.”
In 1940, Maness enlisted in the U.S. Navy and was sent to Jacksonville in early 1941 as an aviation cadet. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he flew seaplanes out of Bora Bora in the South Pacific. He later flew Hellcat fighters off the carrier USS Bunker Hill.
It was just after lunch one day when he had his first close encounter with the enemy.
He was airborne with four other planes when he heard the carrier was under attack.
“I saw these little specks falling out of the sky toward the carrier, dive bombers,” he said. “I peeled off immediately and went after one. I fired on it. Almost went into the water myself. Finally it blazed and went down.
“They surprised us. I was just flying around chasing whatever Japanese planes were pulling out.”
His engine sputtered, fired up and sputtered again. The hydraulic power went out. The crew on the carrier kept waving him off, giving him the signal that he had no tailhook.
He flew around, looking for a place to land before ditching near a destroyer. He was nearly trapped under water before managing to wriggle free of his emergency pack, swim to the surface and inflate the life raft.
“They got me on deck and tried to help me walk,” said Maness. “I told them I didn’t need any help, but, when they let me go, I collapsed.
“They took me in the ward room, and the medical officer had a bottle of medicinal brandy. He offered me some, but I said, ‘No, thanks. I don’t drink.’”
The stirrings of the Civil Rights movement were spreading as Maness joined the National Council of Churches in 1963.
“I was pretty conservative when I went into the National Council,” he said. “I found out that a lot of my ideas growing up in rural North Carolina were not only inconsistent with the teachings of the Methodist Church, but I needed to do some work on my relationships with black people.”
He believed, at first, the Methodist Church was pushing too hard, too fast, on race issues.
“But then I could see any discrimination against anybody is wrong from a humanity point of view, if not from a religious point of view,” he said.
In reaction to growing racial tension in Jacksonville, Maness was asked to join the Community Relations Committee in 1964. The CRC listed its objectives in March: Exploring means of bringing about voluntary desegregation of all establishments serving the public; and studying ways to provide black people with more jobs, better jobs and increased income.
“In the name of simple fairness, we believe Americans have more important things to do than to fight each other in the streets and set race against race,” read the Maness Resolution, issued through the HOPE subcommittee. “It is time forced racial segregation died of fatigue and that, in its place, we grant equality of opportunity to all races, leaving to each person his or her own personal, private preferences.”
When the resolution was passed, all the other white members of the executive committee resigned. That left Maness and 15 black members in the group.
“The very people who had the leadership in this town defaulted,” Maness said. “They wanted nothing to do with recommending desegregation of public accommodations. They didn’t want to rock the boat.”
The committee held no more meetings.
“Nothing happened until President [Lyndon] Johnson took the leadership, the War on Poverty, and calling for enforcement of laws against discrimination,” said Maness. “When the [local] leadership saw — if they didn’t integrate, or didn’t consolidate city and county — the Council would be dominated by blacks, they got busy.”
Maness agreed his attitude probably was considered radical for the time, “But to me it was simple justice. I didn’t think of it as radical. I thought reasonable people would agree. But they didn’t.”
There is, as expected, “room for improvement,” said Maness, “but it is so much better now. So many people are benefiting from what happened, especially because they are more generally accepted, regardless of race, color or creed.”
“No one who has never been where some people have can understand,” he continued, making a serious point with a twinkle in his eye. “They don’t know how important it is to be accepted by your peers, by everybody on the street.
“I know I appreciate people speaking to me. They call me ‘Judge’; they can’t remember ‘Bill.’”