Information on Kitty Hawk lawyers in addition to those mentioned in Chapter 20 of the book:
Clifton Blevins was firmly committed to civil rights and was counsel for five Kitty Hawk defendants. After graduation from Western State University School of Law, he received specialized legal training for Black attorneys from the government. The NAACP often called upon him to represent Black clients in San Diego. Shortly after the Kitty Hawk incident, he interceded on behalf of over one hundred Black crew members of the carrier USS Constellation who refused to return to their ship in order to call attention to racial discrimination. Blevins practiced criminal and personal injury law in San Diego until 2003 and now lives in La Mesa, California.
Mike Pancer graduated from UCLA Law School and represented, without compensation, teenage US Army draftees opposed to the Vietnam War. He also served on an ACLU panel that decided which legal causes to support in San Diego. Not everyone in Navy Town was a fan of those causes. He received vicious hate mail with occasional veiled threats. He responded to the NAACP’s plea for civilian defense counsel and represented two of the Kitty Hawk defendants. His only condition for service was having a JAG officer as co-counsel. Mike Pancer continues to practice criminal law in San Diego.
Lieutenant Paul Black was ideally suited to defend the Black Kitty Hawk sailors. He participated in Martin Luther King’s March on Washington and helped register Black voters in Selma, Alabama. After attending the University of Indiana Law School, he served as a JAG Staff Judge Advocate at the San Diego Naval Training Facility. Called upon to handle one of the Kitty Hawk trials, he was hoping to defend the sailor, but instead was assigned to prosecute. He returned to Indiana after his JAG service and specialized in railroad litigation. He was managing partner of his law firm when he retired in 2017.
Lieutenant Harry Carter grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. He was in ROTC programs at the University of Alabama and later graduated at the top of his class from the University of Alabama School of Law. In San Diego, he was assigned to prosecute seven of the Kitty Hawk cases, and recalls the administrative burden of dealing with scores of witnesses and the challenge of trying to establish a pattern of concerted action by the defendants that would meet the Uniform Military Code’s definition of a riot. Following his JAG service, he practiced aviation litigation and insurance coverage law in San Diego, and retired in 2001.
Lieutenant Bob Pearson grew up on his family’s farm in Tennessee where he worked with young Black men. Despite this, he felt largely uninformed about racial issues until he attended college at Vanderbilt University. After graduation from the University of Virginia Law School, he held JAG assignments in Norfolk, Virginia, and Japan. He later coordinated the prosecution of the Kitty Hawk cases in San Diego. Pearson spent his career in the US Foreign Service, including serving at NATO and as US Ambassador to Turkey. Now retired, he lives in Pittsboro, North Carolina, where he is an active member of the NAACP.