A few hours before Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of a dream before crowds in Washington, D.C., Thomas N. Todd took an oath in New Orleans to practice law.
Freshly admitted to the Louisiana bar, there was no question in Todd’s mind that he picked the right profession on Aug. 28, 1963 — a day history remembers as the March on Washington.
When fellow students at Southern University had asked the charismatic, popular young man to participate in protest sit-ins at “whites-only” lunch counters in Baton Rouge a few years earlier, Todd declined.
“I said, ‘You have enough black students marching. You don’t have enough black lawyers,’” he said.
Todd made a covenant with himself to devote as much of his legal career to civil rights work as he could.
What came next was more than five decades of fulfilling that promise — a career that included opening the nation’s first U.S. attorney’s civil rights office outside of Washington, D.C.; filing the first federal criminal case against a Chicago police officer for deprivation of an individual’s rights; and becoming one local school’s first full-time black law professor.
His influence stretched from his downtown law office to the West and South sides of Chicago as his powerful voice that earned him the nickname “TNT” rallied the community to elect the city’s first black mayor, Harold Washington.
Hip-hop group Public Enemy brought TNT to a new generation when two of his speeches were sampled in songs in the late 1980s.
Semi-retired from practicing law, Todd is still striving to inspire people today as a public speaker on civil rights issues and an advocate for education access and equality.
Todd, 76, was honored in January with a spot on the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame at the Martin Luther King Jr. Historic Site in Atlanta, alongside civil rights icons such as Rosa Parks, U.S. Rep. John Lewis and social activist Julian Bond.
He may not have protested at a lunch counter. But from courtrooms, lecterns and the streets of Chicago, he left his own mark as a civil rights activist.
With more than 500 awards and honorary degrees to his credit, he said he is grateful any time an organization honors or invites him to speak. It’s recognition of the work he has done and attempts to make a difference for others.
“To have them happen is very humbling,” he said. “I want to keep doing what I’m doing for as long as I can do it.”
Early life in Alabama
The importance of education was instilled in Todd at a young age in the 1940s by his mother, who had a second-grade education and worked as a maid for white families, earning $2 a week plus coffee.
Todd’s father died when he was a baby. His stepfather, a longshoreman, could not read or write.
The black community in Mobile, Ala., featured professionals such as doctors and ministers, and Todd’s parents had a deep respect for teachers.
“They saw what education could do and what a difference education could make, so they created this atmosphere that whatever I needed from an educational standpoint I would have,” he said. “That’s how key education was.”
After breezing through elementary school and finishing middle school in a year, Todd began attending Central High School — which like all other schools in the South at the time, was segregated — around his 12th birthday.
The school football team attempted to recruit the 6-foot-1, 260-pound freshman, but Todd’s mother wouldn’t allow him to play sports and wanted him to focus on academics.
Instead, Todd became known as a musician, playing trombone in the band and singing in the choir. Outgoing and outspoken, he was popular among his classmates and was elected to executive offices in student government and served as student body president his senior year.
When he was 16, Todd went to Southern University on a music scholarship with the goal of becoming a music teacher. Two years into college, Todd realized he didn’t want to study music and switched his major to political science at the suggestion of a professor.
Meanwhile, the civil rights movement was exploding in the South. Todd had spent his entire life attending segregated schools and was studying political science at a time when many blacks in Louisiana could not vote.
In 1957, Todd had a surreal experience when he was recruited to play an extra in the Clark Gable-starring film “Band of Angels.” He and other black extras portrayed slaves in the Civil War-era story, which also featured Sidney Poitier.
It was a sobering experience nowhere close to historical reality, Todd said, but it gave him some sense of how blacks were treated and viewed as slaves.
“It was rewarding, it was educational, but it also helped to steel my resolve and commitment to continue to fight against that (segregated) system,” he said.
On Thanksgiving night in 1958, Todd’s mother was hospitalized. She died two days later at age 48 of internal hemorrhaging.
It was devastating for the 20-year-old, and since his stepfather was illiterate, he needed to stay in Mobile to help arrange the funeral and burial.
After graduation, Todd returned to Mobile and worked odd jobs for nearly a year until a friend suggested he apply to law school. Todd returned to Southern University for law school in 1960 and was admitted solely on the recommendation of the dean, who met Todd as an undergraduate and saw potential in him.
There, law professors and students represented students who had been arrested for sitting at whites-only lunch counters at five-and-dime and drug stores — an act of civil disobedience to protest segregation — in Baton Rouge. Todd played a role in the first lawsuit on these actions to make it to the U.S. Supreme Court, Garner v. Louisiana (1961).
He graduated magna cum laude and passed the bar on his first try in 1963.
“Somewhere, at every step of the way, some educator or somebody saw something in me and they were the ones who did it,” he said. “I am obligated and really, really in debt to these educators who took me under their wing.”
Taking on the system
Following law school, Todd took a position in the U.S. Department of Labor solicitor’s office in Washington, D.C. After less than a year there, he left to train for the Judge Advocate General’s Corps and arrived in the Chicago area when he was later stationed at Fort Sheridan, which is in Highwood, Highland Park and Lake Forest.
Todd was appointed an assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago in 1967.
Todd filed the first federal criminal case against a Chicago police officer for violating an individual’s civil rights in 1968. According to United Press International, it was also the first indictment in the country against a law enforcement official under a new civil rights amendment to the federal criminal code.
Chicago police officer Joseph Fine was accused of beating up Eldridge Gaston outside a South Side restaurant. Gaston died as a result of his injuries.
Todd didn’t try the case, and although it ended in an acquittal, “the indictment itself sent shock waves through the Chicago Police Department and political establishment,” he said.
When Thomas A. Foran became U.S. attorney, he allowed Todd to open and lead an office devoted to civil rights in 1969. It became the first local U.S. attorney’s civil rights office in the country.
His next police brutality case originated from a fight between black and white students at Tilden High School. Chicago police officers had allegedly beat black students, and a newspaper photographer captured one incident, which showed officer James J. Gorman standing over 16-year-old Roxanne Norfleet with his baton raised as she was on the ground.
Todd got that case to trial, but it ended in 1971 with a hung jury, though 11 members of the panel favored conviction.
G. Flint Taylor Jr., who as a young attorney represented the families of murdered Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in their civil rights lawsuit against federal, state and Chicago officials, said it was almost unheard of for a U.S. attorney’s office to prosecute a police brutality case at that time.
The stakes were high and “racism was much more in your face,” Taylor said.
So to see Todd as a black lawyer within the U.S. attorney’s office fight for police brutality victims and challenge the status quo was awe-inspiring, he said.
“He stood as an important symbol, as someone who would stand up and do the right thing in the face of opposition,” Taylor said.
The attorney and teacher
Between 1970 and 1974, Todd taught at Northwestern University School of Law — the school’s first full-time black law professor. Todd infused his classes with civil rights law, ranging from the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford to the Hampton case.
Beyond the classroom, Todd mentored many young lawyers, particularly in the black community.
Former Cook County circuit judge Bernetta D. Bush, who graduated from DePaul University College of Law in 1977, said she was one of Todd’s “avid mentees” in her early years as an attorney.
Todd would invite new lawyers to his speaking engagements or to observe him in court, she said, and had an open-door policy at his private practice downtown, where any one could drop by or call for advice. He took a genuine interest in seeing young lawyers be successful.
“He’s just a great guy. He has an overwhelming personality in terms of being affable and open,” Bush said. “He had lots of legal stories to help you understand the law.”
Lucy Lang Chappell worked with Todd when she was president and CEO of the Bobby E. Wright Comprehensive Behavioral Health Center between 1984 and 2013.
Highlighting Todd’s straightforward nature, Chappell recalled a time they went to the Thompson Center to discuss the state budget, and Illinois Department of Human Services officials kept them waiting for more than 90 minutes. Once the officials arrived, Chappell said Todd told them it was “unprofessional” and “disrespectful” to keep Chappell and her staff waiting.
“He did not bite his tongue in saying it. He wasn’t whispering to them — he said it outright,” Chappell said. “There aren’t too many lawyers who would do that, particularly in dealing with the state.”
Todd’s work as an attorney also helped bring programs at historically black colleges in Louisiana up to par with the state’s other schools.
Former Grambling State University president Joseph B. Johnson said Todd’s effort opened the doors for the university to get $300 million in state funding. It helped the school add courses it was unable to afford before — including graduate-level programs and a doctoral program. Grambling and Southern University also upgraded their campus facilities.
“That may have been one of my most fulfilling projects,” Todd said. “It helped improve the schools for the students who were there.”
The voice
When Todd speaks, time stands still and travels decades within minutes.
His mesmerizing cadence and rhythm captures the attention of everyone listening in the audience in the Chicago State University library during the February dedication of his personal papers and archives.
“Free-domm,” he sings quietly in a low bass, elongating the word. “Oh, free-domm. Though I be a slave, I be buried in my grave and go home to my God and be free. I woke up this morning, my mind stayed on freedom.”
His voice swells.
“Oh, I wished I knew how it would feel to be free. I wished I could break these chains holding me. Oh, but Langston Hughes teaches that freedom is just frosting on somebody else’s cake and so it must be. Till we learn. To bake.”
There’s an ache and a low growl in Todd’s voice that rumbles with thunder, rising and falling in waves, occasionally piercing higher octaves. It has a heavy, melodic tone that carries a history of the segregated South, the civil rights movement and conveys an anger and urgency about the present and future.
It’s like hearing an echo of Martin Luther King Jr.
As Todd’s voice booms through the silent crowd and picks up speed with each syllable, it soon becomes clear how he earned the TNT moniker.
“I don’t care how much you text. I don’t care how much you tweet on your BlackBerry or Droid. I don’t care how smart your smartphone is. I don’t care what kind of computer you have. You still can’t download freedom,” he bellows to the crowd, which erupts in applause.
“There’s no app for freedom. You’ve got to work and work and work to make it real, that’s where we are.”
By the end of his speech 15 minutes later, the crowd is on its feet.
That gift for prose goes back to Todd’s high school days, but he said he truly developed his style in the 1970s, learning from black ministers and civil rights activists such as Jesse Jackson.
Todd was president of the local chapter of Operation Breadbasket and helped start Operation PUSH, now known as the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. Todd, the only founder who is not a minister, is credited with coming up with the original PUSH name, which stood for People United to Save Humanity.
When Harold Washington ran for mayor in 1983, Todd headed the campaign’s speakers bureau and served as a surrogate. He was often called on to warm up the crowd before Washington took the stage.
Todd worked on other political campaigns, including U.S. Rep. Ralph Metcalfe’s 1976 race and Jackson’s presidential bid in 1983. He also took on ward and congressional reapportionment cases as an attorney.
Todd always prepares notes for his speeches and never gives one without song lyrics, so it seems fitting that Public Enemy would sample two of his speeches.
The first 16 seconds of the 1989 song “Fight the Power” is punctuated with Todd’s voice. He is also sampled in “Revolutionary Generation,” released in 1990.
“I was flattered because that group came out of the Nation of Islam. They were dealing with rap and hip-hop as social commentary,” Todd said. “I was very flattered by it. I wrote them and told them, because it was put in a context that was serious and it was put in a context that was respectful.”
Paul Jakes, senior pastor at New Tabernacle of Faith Baptist Church on the city’s West Side, said he sees Todd’s legacy as a “beautiful collage” of contributions that span across politics, law, civil rights and education, while still being grounded in his commitment as a family man to his wife, Janis, and daughters, Traci and Tamara.
“I think we as a community stand upon the shoulders of people like attorney Tom Todd,” Jakes said. “And we should never ever forget that bridge that brought us across.”
In his speeches, Todd blends his life experience with civil rights history and law to urge people to continue the fight against economic injustice, education inequality, institutional racism and other civil rights issues.
“The challenge for us is to live our life with nouns, but let verbs define our living,” Todd said. “You live your life with nouns — courage, commitment, compassion. But you let verbs define your living — give, serve and help.”