Episcopal Lives:
Retired Supreme Court chief justice’s long fight to destroy racial discrimination in Oregon’s legal system
By Deirdre Steinberg
Oct 14, 2005, 12:41

Former Oregon Supreme Court Chief Justice Edwin J. Peterson, outside his office at the Willamette College of Law, has fought tirelessly to rid the state’s legal system of discriminatory practices. Peterson is a parishioner at St. Paul, Salem

  How do you go from being a little boy of six who was “ taught to hate blacks, Catholics, and Jews,” to one of Oregon’s most respected jurists; honored for his work to eliminate racial injustice in our state’s legal system?

This is the journey of Edwin J. Peterson, retired chief justice of the Oregon Supreme Court and a parishioner at St. Paul, Salem, who led the fight to uncover and eradicate racism in Oregon’s legal profession and the state’s court system — while simultaneously fighting with all his might to “destroy the racism in my heart.”

From racist to anti-racism activist
Peterson, now in his seventies, and a Distinguished Jurist in Residence, teaching insurance law and pretrial civil litigation at Willamette College of Law, admits that the metamorphosis from a little boy in a small Wisconsin town, who had “a background in hating blacks,” to an adult man who was awarded the Oregon State Bar President’s Affirmative Action Award and a Distinguished Service Award from the Association of Oregon Black Lawyers, has been a voyage requiring constant self-examination and vigilance to make sure he continues not to be a racist.

“The only way to do it is to turn on the light of an individual’s subconscious racism, which, I’d like to add, is not limited to white people, so that she or he can ask, ‘what can I do to overcome this?’ It’s a constant struggle,” says Peterson.

Peterson recounts that he first became aware of his own racism —“I thought I wasn’t a biased man” — many years ago, in, of all places, an Episcopal church. “I was teaching a Sunday School class, and I made a little, off-hand humorous comment that I didn’t realize was racist. But no one laughed,” he says. “As I was driving home in the car, I was mulling this over and it came to me: ‘There was a black couple in the class.’” He hadn’t really noticed their presence before.

Learning from his mistakes
Peterson says when he got home, he felt “compelled” to call up the couple and apologize. “The woman said to me: ‘We get so tired of being the butt of these kinds of jokes.’ It woke up something in me that I hadn’t experience before. I date the beginning of my conversion from being a racist to that conversation.”

When he became chief justice of the Oregon Supreme Court in the 1980s, Peterson began talking to lawyers and started recognizing “the real obstacles faced by women and minorities in this state.” His growing awareness was strengthened when he attended a national conference of state supreme court justices and went to a workshop on racial bias in the justice system. “I came away quite distressed and realized that this same kind of bias must be going on in my own state’s justice system.

Oregon’s history of discrimination
In fact, beyond the justice system itself, Oregon has had a long, uncomfortable and sometimes contradictory history of discriminatory laws, some of which were only struck down in the recent past. Before Oregon was even a state, an 1844 territorial statute outlawed slavery but also insisted that all freed slaves had to leave the territory. Furthermore, Blacks found guilty of violating some laws were to be whipped “20 to 39” times every six months, “until he or she quit the territory.”

In 1859, Oregon became a state—the first admitted to the Union with an exclusion law written into its constitution. In 1862, Oregon adopted a law requiring that all Blacks, Chinese and other ethnic minorities to pay an annual “tax” of $5. If they couldn’t pay this tax, they were forced to work on public improvement projects at the rate of fifty cents per day. A ban on interracial marriage in Oregon—between a white person and anyone with one Black grandparent—was not repealed until 1951, almost 90 years aftger its enactment.

Leads anti-racism task force
After he retired as chief justice in 1991, Peterson stayed on the court and, in 1992, led a task force, The Oregon Supreme Court Task Force on Racial/Ethnic Issues in the Judicial System, to investigate racial discrimination in Oregon’s judicial system.

The taskforce’s report was published in 1994. One the main findings was that many non-English-speaking minorities in court do not comprehend what is going on and do not understand the justice system. This happened for a number of reasons. Sometimes interpreters were not present or not qualified. Also, too few lawyers spoke or understood another language besides English. In addition, there were too few minority lawyers in Oregon and efforts to recruit them were inadequate. Few minorities were called for juries, and even fewer actually served. And, finally, more minorities were likely to be arrested, charged, convicted, and imprisoned compared with “similarly situated non-minorities.”

Court system changes
“I’m proud to say that Oregon’s judicial system subjected itself to a high level of scrutiny,” concludes Peterson. He also notes that the recommendations of the task force were implemented during the tenure of his successor, Chief Justice Wallace P. Carson Jr., another St. Paul parishioner.

Peterson took his findings from his legal world and transferred them over to his world of worship by instituting six-week anti-racism classes at St. Paul — and then to some of Portland’s largest law firms. These corporate law classes spearheaded the establishment of the Uniting to Understand Racism Foundation (www.understandingracism.org), located in Portland. Peterson was the foundation’s first president. It continues today to “raise the level of awareness of participants concerning their unexamined racist attitudes and encourage proactive change.”

Peterson’s journey led from learning bigotry as a child to fighting it with all his heart and intellectual might during a distinguished legal career. Along the way, he worked to make Oregon a better and more just place.