Charlie Newman: The Green Giant

On any given day, a lunchtime visitor to the popular Little Tea Shop on Monroe Avenue downtown may notice a bespectacled, somewhat bookish-looking man sitting quietly at a table in the middle of the room, close to the wall on one side of the restaurant. He will be picking with his fork from a fruit plate, his almost invariable daily choice from the Tea Shop’s menu — “I get this because I don’t have to think about it, and it leaves me free to have what I want at night,” he explains to a recent lunch-mate. And if he happens to be alone, he may be concentrating on a newspaper or some other piece of reading, maybe the latest assignment for the monthly book club he belongs to with a number of other local movers and shakers. 

The catch is, this man is rarely alone at lunchtime, thanks to an unassuming but authoritative manner that is quietly magnetic. This is Charlie Newman, lawyer extraordinaire, not just an inveterate reader of history but a maker of it. He has been a participant in several of the watershed legal moments in Memphis over the last half-century and has long been a fixture at the Tea Shop.

One day in late October, Newman, who had business scheduled for early afternoon, came to the Little Tea Shop just before 11 a.m., before it was technically open for business. The door was unlocked for him by the establishment’s indefatigable proprietor and hostess, Suhair Lauck, whereupon he took a place at “his” table, the one halfway down, close to the wall — tacitly acknowledged to be reserved for him by management and Tea Shop regulars.

If his schedule is not pressing and he sits there long enough, Newman will be joined by this or that judge, lawyer, or civic figure — the Tea Shop attracts more than its share — and soon enough, the table is teeming with people and conversation.

On this October day, the group around Newman consists of a few other seniors and near-seniors. Newman himself will celebrate his 80th birthday in January, but there is nothing of the dotard in him — or his companions, who this particular day include the distinguished advertising maven John Malmo and prominent attorney Dale Tuttle.

The conversation takes several turns. As might be expected of seasoned sorts who remain active, it spans decades of human experience, running right up to the moment (including, for example, a detailed explanation by Newman of the mechanics of his iPhone and how it aggregates personal data).

Some of the talk is vin d’ordinaire. Newman laments that when his wife Kay, an interior decorator, took the couple’s vintage Lexus for an oil change, she was told she needed four new tires, at a price in the neighborhood of $1,000. Newman frowns, the way any practical-minded John Q. Citizen might. “It’s not the price,” he says. “I just don’t necessarily think they need to be replaced.”

The World Series is on, and there is some obligatory chatter on the subject, as there is about another ongoing contest, the presidential race of 2016  between Republican nominee Donald J. Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton. The finale of that one is only days away. Malmo, who on his approach had been described by Newman as “my typical lunchtime companion,” gives thought to a question about who might be the winner.

“None of us!” Malmo answers, and goes on to express awe at the audacious way Trump had stolen a march on his early GOP rivals: “What we call ‘politically correct’ used to be just what you’d call good manners. Trump doesn’t want to use them.” Oddly enough, that taint of boorishness had worked for him politically and made him seem appealingly unconventional. “It’s not what he’s saying but his way of saying!”

Nodding, Newman cites the vintage “medium-is-the-message” theories of Marshall McLuhan and says, “Trump instinctively understands TV media, the way FDR was the first to understand radio.” Then he takes  a leap that has the ring of a freshly remembered epiphany: “We all should have  understood that the Presidency is more style than substance.” 

Making clear that this is not a put-down, Newman applies it to such personal heroes as Roosevelt and JFK, the latter of whom had first awakened his interest in politics with his “glamor” and verve back during what he remembers as the “boring” age of Eisenhower. 

The conversation drifts to the decline in numbers and influence of traditional newspapers. “There’s been a radical change in the nature of news media and a decline of sources we had trust in,” he says. “Now, every human being who wants to has his own printing press.”

Something like an hour and a half has passed since the door to the Little Tea Shop was opened early. By now the place

is buzzing, and for some time Newman has had to break off from table talk to say his hellos. Just before the lunch group breaks up, someone comes by, puts a hand on his shoulder, and says simply, “A great event Saturday!” The event was the official opening of the longest pedestrian bridge across America’s greatest river.

Newman beams. He has not merely been congratulated. In the midst of his reverie about change, he has been reminded of a weekend celebration, still resonating, that connects his present to his past and points straight ahead, both for him and his community, to the future.

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The “Big River Crossing” ceremony of Saturday, October 22 — a hugely ballyhooed affair that drew the major players of Memphis’ political and business community down to the banks of the Mississippi, along with a generous number of excited fellow citizens — to participate in the completion of what was formally known, in the more prosaic lingo of Washington, D.C., as the “Main St. to Main St. Inter-Modal Connector” project.

Fueled both by a $15 million federal TIGER grant (for Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) that was arranged by Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen, and by  roughly the same amount of private funding, the project involved extensive refurbishing of the old Harahan Bridge that, since 1949, has served only for rail traffic across the river and had become the property of Union Pacific Railroad. A long, unused roadway was converted along the bridge’s length into a recreational pathway for joggers, pedestrians, and bicycles, and was extended on both banks to connect with newly renovated downtown areas of both Memphis and West Memphis, Arkansas.

Hence the name of the project, the brainchild of the visionary trader/investor Charles McVean, who had dreamed it up and evangelized for years to get it done, lining up investors, getting Cohen to work his magic on Capitol Hill, and talking the U.P. executives into reversing a long-held policy against such mixed-use on a railway right-of-way.

Charlie Newman was Charlie McVean’s right-hand man in the progression toward this goal. Thus it was wholly appropriate that, among the dignitaries and officials who addressed the blue-ribbon audience gathered in the sanctuary of the Church on the River for the morning’s opening ceremony, Newman was charged with the task of presenting the history of the project. He reviewed the stages that led to the Crossing, forecasting the eventual construction of a levee trail on the Arkansas side going all the way to New Orleans. Lastly, Newman teased the audience with news of a final treat, the “icing on the cake”: a permanent lighting display that, when the sun set that night, after a day of Union Pacific locomotives tooting loud salutes side by side with Memphians traversing back and forth across the bridge by foot and bike, would light up the bridge, and the sky, in glowing technicolor.

So, yes, it had been a great event, and a great day for Charlie Newman — one of many in his long life as one of Memphis’ most productive citizens. 

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The Harahan Bridge project is not Newman’s only current concern on the environmental/recreational front. Of late, he has been a mainstay of the local “Save the Greensward” effort to preserve an endangered swath of the Overton Park landscape from the wear and tear of automobile parking on the part of Zoo visitors. And his fingerprints can be found on virtually every piece of prized public greenery in Shelby County. Both personally and professionally, he was in on the creation of the Shelby Farms Conservancy, which has secured that vast piece of parkland in East Memphis from commercial development and has arranged its current transformation into a pastoral/tourist wonderland. Likewise, he was a direct participant in the planning and preparation that led to the creation of The Greenline, that natural trail for joggers, pedestrians, and cyclists that now stretches across Shelby County.

And all of these ventures, important as they are in their own right, are essentially outgrowths of one of his signature legal victories — one that crowned an epic struggle by local environmentalists against governmental planners, and, in the beginning at least, against the unified will of the Memphis business community, as well.

This was the now famous 1971 Supreme Court case, Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe, in which the plaintiffs, represented by Newman, attempted to prevent the extension of  Interstate 40 through the heart of Overton Park and its celebrated “old forest.” The case took years to resolve, even after the Court ruled in Newman’s favor, finally ending with what we see around us today: fully developed and eminently satisfactory Interstate legs that loop around the city core on their way to the Mississippi River and to Arkansas. A rump section of the original I-40 plan, aimed like a shovel-point at the park, was aborted just this side of it, renamed as Sam Cooper Boulevard in 1986 (after a local industrialist/entrepreneur), and now serves as a dandy access route, city-owned and maintained, from eastern Memphis and Shelby County into Midtown.

But even that moment may not loom as large in the log of Memphis history — or that of the world, for that matter — as Newman’s first major baptism of fire in 1968, when, as a youthful associate of the legendary lawyer Lucius Burch, he joined in representing Martin Luther King during the great civil rights leader’s last legal challenge — for the right to hold a second march on behalf of striking sanitation workers after the first, days earlier, had resulted in violence. Newman’s team prevailed in that effort, but to no avail, as King would be assassinated that very afternoon.

It was a tragedy with enormous implications, but, from that grave moment on, at a time when he was still a young lawyer getting his sea legs, Charlie Newman would be in the forefront of a series of struggles to transform his social environment, and, in the words of the Constitution, “to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” He would not have realized it then, or even thought about things that way, but he was already on his way to becoming a legend.

Charlie Newman was  in the forefront of a series of struggles to transform his social environment, and, in the words of the Constitution, “to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” 

All of that would have been a surprise to the young Charles Newman, the son of a Methodist minister from Mississippi and a 1955 graduate of Memphis Central High School who would go from there to Yale University. As he wrote in response to a follow-up questionnaire sent by the University to its 1959 graduates 50 years later, “It would have been unimaginable to me in June 1959 that I would spend the next half century practicing law in Memphis, or anywhere.”

While at Yale, he explained in that letter, he “came under the spell of some extraordinary teachers in the philosophy department,” “made a firm decision to get a Ph.D. in philosophy and teach,” and “didn’t waver from that decision for the next 4 years.”

He got a graduate fellowship to go to Germany for the 1959-60 year to study with Kant scholar Gottfried Martin at the University of Bonn. Ironically, it was Herr Professor Martin who, as Newman wrote, advised the over-earnest young American to “not work too hard that year, and to spend as much time as possible checking out the rest of Europe.” 

In the course of the resultant free-wheeling Wanderjahr in Europe, Newman’s eyes opened to wider perspectives. “It began to dawn on me that a career in philosophy would be a very lonely path — that the farther down that road I went, the fewer people there would be who would understand what I was doing or care.”

He returned to New Haven, where he entered Yale Law School, having heard that it was “a place that welcomed the mixing of disciplines” and hedged his bets on the future by getting a degree in law, which he thought he would match up with one in philosophy or history.

    But the illness of his father caused him to return to Memphis, law degree in hand, where he ended up clerking for a year with federal judge Bailey Brown (a figure he would later have crucial interactions with). The youthful Newman had thought about setting up in Washington, where JFK’s Camelot was in session, but the assassination of the President in November 1963 gave him second thoughts. He stayed in Memphis, where another star beckoned.

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As Newman’s half-century report to Yale puts it: “By that time I had formed strong relationships with lawyers at a Memphis law firm — a firm led by a remarkable, charismatic man who was much involved in progressive causes in the South.” That man was Lucius Burch, a crusader for conservation and civil rights, who, with partners John Porter and Jesse Johnson, formed the firm Burch, Porter & Johnson.

To Newman, the firm’s partners seemed to view law as “a high calling, a kind of priesthood.” He was invited to join and remains there today, a senior partner among 30-odd lawyers still dedicated to the late Burch’s progressive ideals.

Newman did what young lawyers do — the research and grunt work and routine litigations of the law office. He thought that was just fine. It “gave me the opportunity to be thrown at an early age into the deep end of the pool, and to be involved in matters, which, if I’d joined a typical Washington or New York firm, would have taken me years to experience.”

He recalls a day in 1968 when, as he sat in Burch’s office chatting with the firm’s leading partner, the phone rang. Burch answered it, then turned to Newman and said simply, “Dr. King has hired us.”

King needed legal help to lift a federal court injunction against a proposed second march on behalf of striking Memphis sanitation workers. The injunction had been imposed because violence had broken out during the course of the first march led by King, days earlier.

In his report to Yale, Newman recalled April 3, 1968, when he and several other lawyers from his firm met with King in his room at the Lorraine Motel, a day before the scheduled hearing on his motion.

“I sat on his bed, and he sat in a chair inches away. I sensed about him an almost visible and tangible aura of energy, wisdom, and strength, of a sort I’ve not encountered before or since … I viewed Dr. King then, and I view him now, as a singular, possibly irreplaceable person, one of the few who may have changed the course of our history.”

Reminiscing about that circumstance recently in his downtown office adjacent to Court Square, Newman rummages through a drawer and finds a photograph of five people in federal court on April 4th, the hearing date. The five were two aides to Dr. King, Andrew Young and the Rev. James Lawson; Burch; BPJ attorney Mike Cody; and Newman himself, looking preternaturally young and with the same steady focus in his pale gray eyes that he possesses today.

“Isn’t that something? We’re going into the courtroom,” Newman says, calling back the moment. “The City’s position in court was that having another march would present too high a risk of civil disorder. They put on witnesses, police and FBI people, who said all hell will break loose if we have a march. And we put on our witnesses, including Jim Lawson and Andrew Young. At the end of the day, mid or late afternoon, Judge [Bailey] Brown said, “I’ll lift the injunction. Come back in the morning, and we’ll do the paperwork on it.” 

“We walked back down Main Street to this office, and we heard sirens. And we were told Dr. King had been shot,” says Newman.

Afterward, he realized he was in The Movement to stay: “Yeah, I didn’t play any heroic or major role, but I tried to join every effort there was, and there were a lot of them.” As has been the case ever since. 

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Hard on the heels of his immersion in civil rights came another challenge — one that set him on the way to being the environmentalist soldier that he remains today.

Newman got a call in late 1969 from a college friend, now a member of a prominent law firm in Washington. “He had a partner who had been approached by a little group in Memphis of mainly women,” he says, “who wanted to stop this expressway, and the court up there had sent the case to Memphis, and he needed a Memphis lawyer to join with him in that case.”

The case was the aforementioned Citizens v. Volpe, the famous battle over the future of Overton Park — one that pitted city business interests, the local media establishment, and governmental entities against a group of ad hoc neighborhood activists, precursors of today’s environmentalist movement, who at the time were the proverbial voices in the natural wilderness, crying out against pell-mell development.

The decade-long battle would depend utterly upon the legal and personal perseverance of Charlie Newman. “We went to court, and we thought, frankly, that we would be lucky if we could get the design [modified]; we didn’t have any way of knowing whether we had a good case or not. 

“Well, we came before Judge Brown, the same Judge Brown, and he dismissed us, and it was understandable. At that time, the main law we had was something called the Parkland Statute, which simply said that you can’t use federal money to build a highway through a park or natural area unless there is no feasible improvement alternative to use the park, and if there’s no feasible improvement alternative to use the park then you’ve got to use all possible planning to minimize harm.”

Newman and his associates kept appealing until the case, in 1971, got to the U.S. Supreme Court, where “the Court, to our gratitude and surprise, read those simple words, read a lot into those words. The majority said, ‘feasible’ means you can’t reject an alternative route unless it’s just impossible, a matter of engineering, as in: you’ve got a mountain on one side and an ocean on the other.’”

As Newman notes, “That Supreme Court decision, while it was good and it was a landmark decision and had to do with administrative law, was just the beginning. It was another 10 or 12 years before we finally were able to get the federal highway withdrawn.”

During that time Newman et al. were involved in negotiations with “five different Secretaries of Transportation,” in an effort to get the government to accept a different routing as feasible. The government kept coming up with questionable alternatives, sure to be rejected, like one that intersected St. Peter’s Orphanage, a Jewish retirement home, and even the private residence of Judge Bailey Brown, the presiding local jurist.

And the two opposing bureaucracies —  the state Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration —   had no lack of allies. “The City of Memphis business and political establishments trusted them and assumed that they would do the job right, and that they had everybody’s best interests in mind.” 

The local media were ill-disposed, as well. “My clients were subject to vicious vilification. You’d see all these political cartoons here. The Commercial Appeal, for one, had an absolute freeze on us. We’d actually be shut off editorially and also in news coverage.”

It was a war of attrition. But the time would come when the other side would cry uncle. Make that Uncle Sam. As Newman says, “From day one, the City had the right to exchange this highway for the amount of money that it would cost to build it, and by the time we got the continuance in, the cost of building, what they kept doing was proposing ever-deeper, more expensive tunnels, initially trenches and then they would cover the trenches and make it a tunnel.

“When you have an expressway, it makes it easier to live way out and work in town. Gradually, that sucks strength from the central core, and Downtown would have died.”

“So it was going to cost $320 million, and we kept saying to the City, the business establishment, and the Chamber of Commerce, ‘This is too good to turn down; you’re getting $320 million! All you’ve got to do is abandon this venture and take the money, and you can spend it on any transportation purpose you want to!’”

Eventually that argument would win the day, and the forces of the establishment threw in the towel. The northern loop of circumambient I-240 was refurbished and converted into I-40, and things worked out for the best in all ways, Newman thinks.

“Those kinds of highways in the center of cities suck strength from midtowns and downtowns. The idea back then was that downtown needed such a highway and it would pump blood into downtown. I think precisely the opposite would have been true … because when you have an expressway,

it makes it easier to live way out and work in town. Gradually, that does sucks strength from the center and Downtown would have died. 

“I think one of the reasons that Downtown has had this amazing renaissance is that it is now so convenient to live in Midtown and Downtown.” 

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The I-40/Overton Park battle altered the map of Memphis, and it put Newman on the map as a regional legal expert in environmental matters. There would follow numerous segue cases — construction of the Greenline, for example, which required complicated and protracted legal negotiations with railroads — and Newman’s work in facilitating the Shelby Farms Conservancy, a mission he regards as incomplete so long as plans remain afoot (shades of the I-40 case!) to build and route a super-parkway through this sprawling East Memphis property that used to be a penal farm and is now yet another parkland wonder for Shelby County.

In another sphere, Newman has also become a champion litigator in First Amendment cases — like one, Wilson vs. Scripps-Howard, in which a Mississippi cattle farmer sought damages from Channel 5 for its characterization of his starved-looking livestock. Newman increasingly thinks that case, which set an important legal precedent, may have been his most important yet. “We got the Court of Appeals to hold for the first time that, when a private plaintiff sues for defamation, he has the burden of proving that what was said about him was false,” he says.

The man whose legal career has helped define both the intellectual and geographical landscapes of his community lives with his wife Kay in a modestly elegant house on a tree-shrouded lot in East Memphis. It is a comfortable-looking, well-kept abode with period furniture inside, along with mounted original paintings by celebrated local artists like Burton Callicott. There is a handsomely glassed-in back porch, ideal for conversations with friends. Outside the main house is a modest mini-Versailles of inviting green areas and sculpted garden spaces. In the back is a studio where Kay Newman works on her interior decorating projects.

All in all, it is the kind of place you would expect to find inhabited by a practitioner of the liberal arts, an artist or writer of some sort, or a professor of philosophy, which is what he first set out to be as a student at Yale. Newman still sees himself as having “stumbled” into the profession of law, through a succession of unexpected quirks and circumstances. He sees the two vocations as having meshed into each other to some degree, though, and is happy that his chosen one has led him away from insularity and into consistent and practical intercourse with the world.

Newman’s attachment to his home town became ever more real as he realized the enormity of its problems and, paradoxically, the great opportunities those problems present. “We have had a very large, desperately poor population, most of whose ancestors came to Memphis from Mississippi and other rural areas, and some whose ancestors lived in what was really de facto slavery long after legal slavery ended. And they had all the problems that we ought to expect they would.

“One thing that strikes me is the number of young people in their 20s and 30s that I know, people who could live anywhere in the country — young lawyers who could practice at the most prestigious law firms on both coasts, and others who could go anywhere — who have come to Memphis by choice and who profess to love it. I think one thing that attracts them is that while we’ve got the full array of problems that exist in every urban area on earth, we’ve also got a city that is open.”

That is not exactly how a Chamber of Commerce promotion might pitch the city, but Newman sees it as a selling point. It certainly was to his own generation.

“We were fortunate to have dropped in our laps a set of very specific issues having to do with race. It was easy to know where we should be, and thrilling to be even on the fringes of that. Kids these days are hungry for a cause, but they don’t have many no-brainer causes like civil rights. Even global warming is not just simple and cut and dried.”

Charlie Newman remains on the case at Burch, Porter & Johnson, pushing 80 but ready for the next issue that needs litigating, the cause that needs protecting, the goal that needs pursuing. The monthly book club he belongs to, founded by the late historian Shelby Foote, requires each member in turn to pick a book for the others to read, one that has stirred that participant’s imagination. 

Newman’s last pick? Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. In ways suggestive of that novel’s dedicated questor, the steady gaze of his pale gray eyes is still on the horizon, ever on the lookout.