THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Jo Carol Nesset-Sale

“I don’t want to forget the people who are impacted by wrongful rules.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, May 2024

JCNS:  My name is Jo Carol Nesset-Sale. I was born May 24th, 1947, in Richmond, Virginia.

JW:  Briefly, tell us about your childhood. What in your childhood do you think maybe led you to the person you became? Anything about ethnicity, family, whatever you think.

JCNS:  There were a few things that I look back on that I think really helped squeeze me into the path that ultimately, I took in profession, in action, in virtues. Many of them go back to my childhood in a very segregated city. Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy. So, I grew up understanding and experiencing “Whites Only water fountains at playgrounds. The doctor’s office that had a larger White waiting room and next door, there was a small waiting room for coloreds.

Going to all White schools until I was in junior high, when very select high achieving African-American students would be admitted. These were students who not only got all A’s, but played in the Richmond Youth Symphony, or were unblemished, which no White child was required to be. I was in the last all-White graduating class in my high school.

That White educational experience was in stark contrast to the environment of Richmond, which was a very mixed White and Black community. Mixed in terms of population, but always in terms of separateness. I got on the public bus and I sat in the front half, and Black residents got on the bus and walked to the back. I remember walking to the back, sitting down one day, and people just looked at me. No one really said anything, but that wasn’t supposed to happen.

In the midst of all of that separation, I was very active in my Southern Baptist Christian Church. I feel like these days I ought to almost put Christian in quotations because ultimately, I decided that very fundamentalist church does not represent Christian values as lived by the Jesus who walked through the New Testament. So that’s walking a parallel track in my life.

When I was young, we used to go swimming a lot, my family; at a place called Eve’s Lake, and then at another lake whose name is forgotten, but these were private lakes. Some were natural lakes, and some were man-built lakes, but they were for Whites only. I have a vivid remembrance of when I was, maybe, I’m guessing 8 or 9, 10 years old, maybe, when a Black family of four came to swim. A man and his wife, and two children about my age and a little younger, and they were turned away.

It caused a bit of a commotion because these folks really wanted to come in and swim and they were not permitted to come in. I remember going to the pavilion where I could see the parking lot and saw this family of four from their backs walking away to their car. They were in bathing suits, as I remember. They looked like a typical family, except for color. It so distressed the owner that these folks came and tried to gain entry, that he closed the lake for the rest of the day. And I thought, “I didn’t do anything and I’m not getting to stay and swim,” and I didn’t understand why this family couldn’t come in and swim, especially where they had bathing suits. So, I tucked that away.

Then the summer, I think it was the summer I was 12, it was the summer that especially Black college students in the Southern coastal States were staging sit-ins at Woolworths. Now, for newbies, Woolworths was maybe the equivalent of an upscale Dollar General. It was a department store that catered to working-class, middle-class folks. Sold everything from yard goods, and clothes, to having a lunch counter.

It was actually my first paid job; outside of babysitting in high school. My senior year at Christmas I was a cashier at Woolworths for .75 cents an hour, first job. But back when I was 12, it turned out there were some college students, or mainly college students, who were doing a sit-in in Richmond. They had already been done in Greensboro, North Carolina, and I heard about it. I don’t know if I watched the news or I read about it in the newspaper; I was already a daily reader of the newspaper.

So, I got on the bus by myself, bussed downtown, and wanted to see what was happening. I just remember going up to the plate glass windows that were on the front wall on Broad Street of the Woolworth store, and putting my hands up in the sunlight to just peer in to see what was going on. I saw a lunch counter, and I could see mainly the backs and the sides of some well-dressed folks. Most of whom appeared to be in their 20s I would say, sitting there waiting for the cup of coffee that was never going to be delivered.

And I stood there for quite a few minutes. I believe the servers were actually Black women. That would have been their typical role, serving White customers; back in the day when they had the uniforms with the handkerchiefs out of their pocket at the diners. And I couldn’t understand why these well-dressed, well-behaved folks were sitting on a stool and couldn’t be served anything.

We fast forward from age 12 to my years in college. I went to the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, where I was a sociology major and learned a lot about groups, and took anthropology, and sociology, and psychology, and how we get to be who we are. I was lifeguarding the last two summers after junior and senior year, at an all-Black public pool in Richmond. Now, it was not designated Blacks only, but the city built three pools and put them in all-Black, primarily low-income, but certainly Black neighborhoods. Prior to these summers, Black students mostly swam in the James River, which takes a particular current crawl to be successful.

So, 99 % of the patrons were African-American. I applied to be a lifeguard. I was the only woman lifeguard at the pool. I was one of only two White staffers. The rest of the staff; all the lifeguards and the concession folks, they were Black men and women. And I had a great summer. The other staffers were college students like me. One, I remember, was a returnee from Vietnam. He was a young Black guy in his early 20s. I remember we would sit and talk during the lunch breaks and at other times and these were folks just like me. I mean, these were the most extended conversations I had likely had with Black young men and women. It was a terrific summer.

My mother had had – I’m going to call her a friend – when I was little, that I got to have a lot of interaction with, but it was mostly watching my mother interact. This woman accompanied the White egg man who came every Saturday and brought eggs to the neighborhoods. Now, we were a middle to lower-middle-income family. My parents were high school graduates. But this woman would come and sit and often my mother would have a cup of coffee with her, and they would talk. She was so sweet.

She was there over several years, and she and my mother just talked like old friends, and I would observe that. She had what I would call “Café au lait skin.” Today, we would say she was biracial. Back in that day, you would say she was a mulatto, or she was, high yellow was a name, but she was biracial and was a wonderful woman. So, it was in that background of the first Black person I ever knew, and these other experiences through my college years that I just did not understand how they lived separately; in housing, and education, in church.

The summer between my junior and senior year in college, the adults in my church had asked me to speak to the adult education class. A large number of folks, that summer, coming back. I had been very active in the youth group in my church, and was a leader in the church and I had heard that that summer for the first time, instead of having children and adults with symbols and flags walking through the neighborhood, making noise, inviting all the neighborhood children to Vacation Bible School for two weeks, this year, they had decided only children already enrolled in Sunday school could come.

And that was because Black children had moved into the neighborhood, and we can’t be having Black children come to Vacation Bible School. I was just mortified. And it seemed contrary to all of the preachings of Jesus and all of the songs that I grew up with. “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white. They are precious in his sight.” Well, it had no meaning. The song had no meaning anymore.

So that summer, when I was invited to speak, that Sunday, I went through all of the scripture, Old and New Testament scriptures, about how God loves children, how Jesus loved children. He loved all the children, “Except you be as a little child, you won’t enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

It wasn’t “Except as you be as a White child,” so, I essentially lectured them. All these scriptures and songs, and I had a prayer which I cried through because my heart was broken. And I said, “In spite of all of this background of what we are supposed to be as Christians, known by our love, you have chosen not to love these children and not to bring them in. And I am so ashamed and so broken and disappointed.” And I cried and left. Afterwards, some people actually said, “You really told us off,” or “We deserved that,” but did they ever change the vote and admit the children? No. And five years later, that church sold itself to a Black congregation. So, this was the pauldron, I think, of my formation, in part, my personality, my experience.

And so, I went off to Cleveland, Ohio, after graduation from William and Mary, and was going to be a social worker but there was a hiring freeze in child services. I was stuck in public assistance, changing addresses and numbers of children, doing what an eighth-grade educated person could do. I saw an opening for a school. It actually was a Catholic elementary school that needed a first-grade teacher. I said, “sign me up. Let me go apply.”

I was 21 years old. I was hired on the spot by the nun who was the principal, and I said, “You know I’m not Catholic.” I had now abandoned and left the Southern Baptist Church because it was no longer Christian, in my view. So, I was adrift, but I surely wasn’t Catholic. And she said, “But you’re the first applicant who has a four-year diploma, so we’re hiring you.”

It was great. I taught 38 first graders. I loved them. They were delightful. They had supportive parents at St. Ignatius Elementary School in Cleveland, but I felt my calling was to continue to teach, but at a higher, more secondary level. So, I entered the Master’s in Teaching program at John Carroll University, and I took an extra early semester of all English courses so I could be certified in English and Social Studies, both. And in that program, which was two summers and a year, I obtained a Master’s of Art in Teaching.

I was assigned during that program to Patrick Henry Junior High School, on the east side of Athens – what one would call the “East side ghetto” of Cleveland. The school was 2,200 students, seven through nine, all Black except for one Chinese girl, virtually all poor, most of them single-parent families. And I taught English and Social Studies there. I began there in 1969 or ’70, my semester of internship, and then I stayed on the next year. And it was that next year in March that I got summoned to the vice-principal’s office.

Now, I should have known that nothing good ever happens when you go to the vice-principal’s office. It’s like the novels that begin, “It was a dark and stormy night,” and nothing good follows. So, I go to the office and he said, “Ms. Lafleur, I hear you’re expecting a child.” And I said, “Well, Mr. Wilkins, yes, I am.” I had been married for three years since the summer after graduation, and my husband and I – he was also a teacher – were having a baby. And he said, “Well, you know you’re going to have to leave then your position.” And I said, “Not to worry, my child is going to be born in July. School ends in early June. I get to finish the year.”

He says, “No, you have to leave at four months of pregnancy. When is your fourth month?” “I’m not telling you when my fourth month is. I told you my child is being born way into the summer. I don’t want to leave.” I said, “I’ll sign whatever you want so that I can stay.” And he said, “Didn’t you read the teacher’s handbook?” Well, actually, I didn’t because it’s filled with bureaucratic nonsense. It was pages, and I didn’t read it. And then I realized he’s deadly serious. He filled out the paperwork for me. He guessed wrong. I think I actually taught closer to five months. But he put down a date by when I was going to leave, which was only two or three, maybe a month down the road.

And I’m going, “I can’t believe this.” I began to talk to other teachers and was surprised that the older teachers weren’t too troubled by it. The older women teachers were just, “That’s the way it is. What’s the problem?” But the younger teachers certainly were in sympathy with me. Well, I was a member of the teacher’s union, so I went down to the teacher’s union representative, who was a man, and he said, “Ms. Lafleur, what’s the big deal? Just go home and have the baby.”

And I remember saying, “Listen, I don’t crochet. I don’t knit. What I do is teach.” And my children, I taught all morning a class of seventh-grade girls who were at high risk of quitting school. They had lost one teacher that year because of pregnancy. I would be the second teacher to disrupt their learning. In the afternoons, I taught English and Social Studies classes to typical students, one class were very good students, and I had a study hall. And I just didn’t get the union’s viewpoint that this was not a big deal.

JW:  I’m surprised that the union… I mean, I get the older teachers, but even the union was like, “Hey, this is how it is.”

JCNS:  Yes, it was very disappointing. He was a Black man in his 40s, and I think I would have thought that a Black person would have understand this notion of doing what you’re told, being kept in your place; but I think he was acting more like a man and the notion of the color and that discrimination, it just wasn’t at the forefront of his thinking. I did write to the Cleveland Board of Education, and I said, “Please, my child is going to be born in July. I want to complete the year. I’m healthy. Everything is good.” And I got a letter back saying, “Oh, Ms. Lafleur, if it were just you, you could stay. We hear that you are an excellent teacher, but this isn’t just about you. It’s about all teachers who become pregnant.” So, he was not going to treat me differently.

I am now aggravated. I can’t believe that logic is not carrying the day. It was just not rational. I realized then, that I had not seen other pregnant teachers, so I thought, “Well, I’m not going to let this go. I’m digging in my heels now.” I’ve never been a radical, really before, except for that speech. I had been a radical once in my church where we were voting to bring in a new associate minister, and I thought he was too old. So, I went to the meeting and voted No, and was the only one who voted No.

And I said, “Listen, you’re talking about the future of this church. It’s not going to have a future if you bring in this old retired person.” And I remember saying to them; because they were putting a lot of pressure saying, “We always do this by acclamation. We can’t have a No vote.” And I said, “Well, I suppose I could abstain.” I was 16 years old, “I suppose I could abstain. No, I can’t abstain. I’m going to vote No.” So, they recorded my No vote. Life went on, he came in, and the church died.

So, I had learned to use my voice. My lived experiences were now coming into play, and I called the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the local newspaper, and I said, “Research, I’d like research. Hello, ma’am, could you give me the name of a women’s lib group?” Now, this is in the ’60s. That was the name. You’re a women’s liber. I guess that’s a liberal woman. But I didn’t know the name of a group, I wasn’t in a group.

And so, this nice woman did some research and came back, and she gave me the name of two or three different groups, or people associated with them. And so I had their number. But before I called them, I thought, there’s one more group I ought to give a chance to, because they’ll want to help me. That’s what they do. American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU, they’ll want to help me. My right to teach has been taken away.

I contacted the director of this Cleveland Group. I had two or three phone calls, maybe two phone calls and a letter. I had substantial communication. Ultimately, he said, “Ms. Lafleur, your case is a loser. We are busy. There are more important cases, like whether students can wear black armbands,” and I’m going, “Give me a break. But their teachers can’t teach?”

I taught students who were pregnant at Patrick Henry. I had a ninth grader in my study hall, she had two children. She was 14. One of the seventh-graders I had, who was 12, was pregnant. I talked prenatal care with these students. They were planning a shower for me. They were happy for me. I had a great relationship with them. And the ACLU telling me [about] black armbands; that it was a loser and they couldn’t be bothered, that’s when I picked up the phone and started calling the lawyers.

One of the early calls was to someone who said, “I can’t help you, but let me give you a name and a number.” And I called that person, “I can’t help you, but here’s a name and a number.” I think that third number was to Jane Picker, who was with the Women’s Equity Action League in Cleveland, that was devoted to getting equitable treatment for women and filing lawsuits when necessary to vindicate those rights.

Jane was a Yale, I think, class of ’62 law grad, one of only a handful of women in her class. She was then in her early 30s, and she is the one who ultimately did the appellate work. She had a conflict, I think she had worked for the law firm that was going to represent the school board, so she couldn’t really represent me at trial, but I remember going to her house on a Sunday afternoon in Cleveland Heights or Shaker Heights, and she said, “We’re going to take your case. The buck stops with us. We’re not going to charge you anything. We’re just going to do it because it’s right. I’m just telling you; I think this case is going to go to the United States Supreme Court and your son or daughter may well be old enough to read the opinion before this case ends.” I’m going, “Wow.” I was pregnant at that point. She was pretty prescient about things.

Before I leave the school setting, I’ll just say we did try, the trial lawyers, to get an injunction that would have prevented the school board from pushing me out until there was a trial. That way, I could have finished the school year. Because for me, the biggest losers were the children who weren’t going to receive their education and who would twice have been dismissed, as though their interests in continuity of education didn’t matter. And it was not lost on me that these were black children whose families were used to being dismissed as though they didn’t count.

I had a conversation with my classes, and I said, “Listen, they’re trying to kick me out because I’m pregnant. I’m not going willingly. I’m not going to tell you goodbye, because if I say goodbye, it means that it’s okay. That somehow, it’s okay. And if I’m not here one day, it’s because they won’t let me come down.”

And I said, “I was raised in the south. I’m this white young college woman who never had discrimination, and I know that you and your families have had it for a long time in this country. And now I’m getting it, and I finally get a sense of how ugly it is and how illogical it is and how hurtful it is. I’m trying my best for you to not lose me as your teacher because I care about your education so much. But there is a day coming when they’ve told me I’ll have to leave.” And I told them what that date was. “And if I’m not here after that, it’s only because they wouldn’t let me come down here, but I’m going to keep showing up and try to continue to teach you.”

And that’s what I did. When that date came and they said I couldn’t teach, I went to the principal’s office, and I said, “Mr. Wilkins, I’m here. I’m ready to teach my class.” “Ms. Lafleur, I’ve told you that you can’t be here.” “Yes, you’ve told me that we let pregnant students stay.” They were allowed to stay, with their lack of prenatal care, with the higher risks of being 13 and having a baby, they got to stay. Higher risk of being assaulted by other students, they got to stay. But I didn’t get to stay.

So, for two weeks, I showed up every day and had the Union rep sign that I showed up to teach, and I wasn’t permitted to teach. After that, the point had been made but I did that because the lawyer wanted me to do it. And that began then the next two and a half years of legal challenge, because my son was born in July of 1971, so about three months or three and a half months after I left the classroom. I did learn that it was one of the older women teachers had told Mr. Wilkins that I was pregnant.

JW:  I see. I wondered that. How did he know? Somebody blabbed. Interesting. Well, I want to hear more. Obviously, you had your lawyers who, as you indicated, went on for two and a half years, there were also other plaintiffs in the lawsuit, right? I mean, you’re the named plaintiff, but did you have other women that they brought in to be part of it?

JCNS:  After they latched on to me, and we latched on to each other, they heard of another teacher, Susan Nelson. She was fired from her job in Cleveland because she had not taught at least a year. If you were in your first year of teaching and became pregnant, you were fired. If you had been in the system more than a year, they put you on mandatory leave. And mandatory leave was from the fourth month of pregnancy, which is when you typically begin to look pregnant. So, they let you stay if you’re having morning sickness and having to eat crackers.

I didn’t have morning sickness, but during a time of personal discomfort, they let you stay. Once you began to look pregnant, you were out from four months until the semester following the three-month birthday of your child. So, for many teachers, it was a whole school year you lost. All of this without pay. And here we are now at a time when it’s very hard to get maternity leave. I mean, if you’re with a small employer, you’re just gone. We’re still punished for having babies. Back then, they made you take time off, admittedly to be poor, but you did get time with your child.

And then there was another teacher who learned about our case, Susan Cohen, I think was her full name. She was in the Richmond area where I grew up, and they put her out. The vast majority of school districts had this rule. They just did. In Cleveland, they had a rule until the ’50s that caused the termination of any female teacher who got married. That that was an act of neglect to the children, not to the men who married them if they were teachers, but to the women.

I wrote a letter to the Richmond News Leader, and I said, “I hear there’s this case, and this is my hometown area, and I can’t believe that you’re being this ignorant. She’s capable. Why do you think putting women on a pedestal is at all good for the woman? It’s isolating. It’s demeaning.” Anyway, I had this letter to the editor that I wrote. That case was trailing, it was in a different circuit, so it never joined with us but ultimately, these cases were argued the same day because they came out with different opinions.

JW:   In the Supreme Court, they were argued the same day, you’re saying?

JCNS:  They were, because the Fourth Circuit Appellate Court agreed that “We need to keep our women; We need to keep them on that pedestal. We can’t let life happen to them.” I mean, it’s just ridiculous. But it was okay to have a universal rule for all women. And yes, even though it disrupts continuity in many cases. Because you take a teacher who’s able to be teaching and remove her, but it gives us predictability for those women whose babies are due in February. We put them all out at the same time. I mean, it was insane.

Ultimately, we won our case in the appellate court. The trial Judge would not give us an injunction and said we were not entitled to a jury trial under this Civil Rights Act of 1898, that we were traveling under. This was the judge, Judge Connell, who was going to decide the case. And when he said about our request for an injunction, “Ms. Lafleur will get what she deserves, and she doesn’t deserve an injunction,” and now he was going to sit as the judge and the trier of fact. That goose was cooked.

So, we had a trial. We lost at the trial. And I’ll tell you, Judy, the way they described this rule, and pregnant women, was just incredible. It wasn’t me. The expert talked about how pregnant women cannot stand erect because their center of gravity has shifted. So, we’re all bent over. We can’t carry books the way we might have to carry four or five books, and we would be unable to do that. And we’d be going to the bathroom all the time. And I just thought, “That wasn’t me. I was completely healthy.” But that was how they described it, and it was a male expert, of course, who described it.

We had an elderly OB-GYN who was our expert. She was, I think, in her 80s, and she practiced at a Cleveland hospital. She was a mother of several children, and she would talk about going from her own hospital rounds to lie down in labor and delivery and have her children. She just made us seem like normal people, and it was lovely. Especially after Mr. Wilkins had said to me, “Ms. Lafleur, if your stomach were expanding because it was a tumor, of course, you would be able to teach. But it’s not a tumor. It’s a baby.” And I thought, “This just seems backwards to me somehow.” But of course, I think if you have a tumor and you’re capable, if your stomach is getting huge, you should teach. It should be an individual consideration.

We lost at the lower court, and we appealed to the sixth district that sits in Cincinnati. And again, my husband and I went down to listen to the appeals. One of the men who rode up in the elevator with us that day in the courthouse, was this distinguished, white-haired-looking gentleman. We had our son with us who I think was a year and a half old, and Michael was being happy, and he sat with us. I don’t even think my husband had to leave the courtroom with him, but we wanted him there.

And this man was very nice and said, “Oh, he’s a cute little guy.” And then when we sat in the courtroom and the three judges came out, one of them was the man we had ridden up with in the elevator, Justice Tom Clark. I thought, “Wow, I’m glad we were being nice to our son, and he was being good back.” We got his vote, so it was very good. We had a two-one vote. Two of the judges thought it was inappropriate to have this universal rule about pregnant women that set us apart.

The school districts had a way of handling emergencies with teachers. So, if a teacher was in a skiing accident and had to be out five months, they would have no notice but they would get a substitute, they’d find a new teacher. If a teacher moved suddenly, they had ways, and pregnant women can generally say, “My child is expected here. I would like to teach until X. Arrange for a sub to be ready.” They could have worked it out.

When I later had my daughter, after I became a public defender, I worked until the night before she was born. I was healthy. I had court appearances, and the next morning, I had a cesarean section that had been planned. I was able to just live my life and do well. But in the ’60s, pregnant women were neither to be seen nor heard, and I think that is the reason the testimony came up in the trial. “Well, we’re afraid the students would be gambling on when her due date was,” sort of like a football pool. Or, they would be making crude remarks or fun remarks at a teacher’s expense. Well, so what? So what?

It would also have allowed me to have talked about the natural nature of childbirth, how important prenatal care was. I also was modeling that, ideally, you get married and then you have children, so a child has a mother and father in the household in support at a very difficult time. I would have modeled so many good things.

I think it would have indicated that teachers are sexual beings. You can’t know about a man’s sex life, but if a woman is pregnant, it has a certain disclosure about her, and I think they thought in the ’60s and ’70s and before that, it was inappropriate. So, there were a lot of cultural and societal pressures regarding that. And it’s expensive to hire a lawyer. If I hadn’t been stubborn enough and feeling victimized enough, being treated badly to have kept looking for a lawyer who wouldn’t need money; because I tell you, public school teachers could never have afforded to have taken on a large public school system. You wouldn’t have the money to do it. So, I needed what we would call a pro bono lawyer who would take me on because it was the right thing to do.

There had not been women’s groups too many years before that, so my case, I’d like to think, came at a right time where they were waiting for someone who could now come to their organization and seek help. And I’m so glad I was able, and determined, to try to do that for them.

JW:  Yes, me too. I’m so glad you did it also. Did you go to the Supreme Court argument?

JCNS:  I did. We drove down to DC, I had never been in the building, and it was exciting. I had been a big fan of Justice William Douglas. I wanted him to ask a question, and he didn’t. He sat there and rocked in his chair. Of course, we had his vote. I’m not sure, frankly, how today this case would go. I’m really not. But back then, in the days of the Warren Court and the civil rights legislation of ’64, there were some different times.

But I do remember Justice Blackman putting a question to my lawyer. The only question I actually remember being asked, because it hit me, he said, “Counsel, do you really believe there’s any difference between a man losing his job because he refuses to shave off his beard and a woman losing her job because she’s pregnant?” Now, later, she said that she thinks that was his giving her a softball. A way to just ask her a question so she could pontificate and educate. And he voted for us. But I remember her standing there putting her arms akimbo; her husband was her co-council. He was sitting at table; he was a law professor at Case Western.

And she said, “Mr. Justice, that analogy is ludicrous, simply ludicrous.” And I remember seeing Sydney grab his head and kind of lower it. That was pretty bold for any lawyer to say to a justice, much less any young lawyer in her 30s, female, but she went on to say, “All a man has to do to remedy the situation is shave a beard that will grow back. That’s not part of him. He just has to do that. But for a woman, it would be to terminate her pregnancy, to terminate what is growing within and will be her child. It’s just completely apples and oranges,” whatever she said. And it was well put. But that’s the only exchange that as a non-lawyer, I’m hearing with, “Oh, wow. Okay”

My lawyers did want this case to be decided on what they call, equal protection. That we wanted the same protection for women regarding their employment that male teaching employees had, and we didn’t. We are not bodily built [like] men, but there are no conditions for men that terminate them, and this is about health. There are no other conditions in which healthy educators are forcefully put out of the classroom and I was a healthy educator.

So, it’s only the pregnancy that sets me apart, and that’s part of my gender. You’re discriminating against the hundreds of millions of women who have been, or will become pregnant for a condition of their gender. While not all women have children, almost always it’s the women who bear the childbearing responsibility. Society needs women to have children, and we were being denied the equal protection of those laws.

We couldn’t get the five votes that we needed. I think we were at four votes with hindsight on that, but the court decided on a newfangled theory of impermissible rebuttable presumption. That it was wrong to presume that all pregnant women are unable to teach. It’s just wrong, because many can. And it was wrong to presume that in the semester following the three-month birthday of their child, that women are not able to teach.

That was really a societal, a patriarchal decision, that we want women to remain in the home and be the primary child rearers for that period of time. Even if the husband or dad is present and wants to do that, we’re going to make women stay home with these babies for this extended period. So, they did get rid of that, leaving a window and said, Maybe at some late part of pregnancy, a rule could be established.” But in fact, no district, to my knowledge, did that. They just said, “We’ll work it out individually with teachers, and if they want to leave a week or two early, do that. If they want to work until the baby comes, we’ll do that.” And life went on.

The interesting thing for me was, immediately adjacent to the city of Cleveland is the old suburb of Lakewood. When Cleveland booted me out for being pregnant, I applied to be a substitute teacher in Lakewood. And the rest of the school year; I was in my eighth month when the school ended, I was substitute teaching virtually every day. I felt great. They did not have that rule and I was able to do that. So that was my experience with the Cleveland School Board.

I haven’t mentioned what I think is a punitive effect. I did ask for a return to teaching for the next school year. My son was born in July, and I said, “I want to be back in the classroom in September when school starts.” I really didn’t. I really wanted to be a substitute teacher that year when he was so little and just teach when I wanted to substitute, but I had to ask. And they said, “No, we have a rule. You can’t stay.” So, the next semester, when my semester of time off was off, I said, “I’m ready again to come back.” “Yes, you’re now eligible.”

I had already determined that there were two schools in Cleveland I would not teach in because of the heightened violence, not just student on student, but student on teacher. There were guns being pulled on friends of mine [who] taught in that school. One of them, in the parking lot, a student pulled a gun on him and argued with him because the teacher was giving too much homework. I was not going to teach in one of these two schools, and I was assigned to one of those two schools.

They said, “Oh, Ms. Lafleur, we don’t have any positions back at Patrick Henry that you taught at,” which had a faculty of 85. “No, but you’re welcome to go to this school.” I turned them down and accepted a full-time position at Lakewood High School where I had been a substitute teacher, and ended my teaching career there when I decided to go to law school full-time.

JW:  Well, that’s what I want to hear about. Why did you decide to go to law school? How did that happen?

JCNS:  Well, it occurred to me that one person actually can make a difference. At a moment in time, if you can find a lawyer who will help you, and you have a good plaintiff, that you can change things and I tucked that away. And Jane Picker, my appellant lawyer, was very encouraging. She thought I understood all the legal issues and had a good legal mind.

I found that as I was teaching, I liked working and talking one-on-one with the kids who were in trouble, who were on probation, who were having difficult home lives. And I thought, “I think I like one-on-one better.” Maybe I’ll do juvenile law where I can work with kids in trouble, kids in foster care. Kids who are kind of wounded. And that was my intention when I went to law school. So, I dipped my toe in.

My decision came down in January of ’74, I believe it was. That August, I started the night school program at Cleveland Marshall College of Law, but I taught full-time at Lakewood High School. My son was two, and I went to law school three nights a week. Now, that was a lot on my plate. At the end of that year, it was time to fish or cut bait, and I said, “I’m going to leave the teaching behind” and I transferred to the University of Utah. We wanted to live in the mountains, my then husband and I. We divorced our first year out there, but we were both there. I completed law school out there and stayed for almost 30 years and practiced law before moving to Athens, Georgia.

That’s how I got to law school. Now, of course, way leads on to way, and what I ended up doing primarily right out of law school, I became a public defender. I was just drawn always to the underdog. It had been these Black students; I remember wanting to teach there. I had a lot of White guilt. I’m not sure that that’s talked about enough. But if you had a fair mind at all growing up in the South, you should feel terrible at the way your Black neighbors were treated, and I felt bad for the way the Black children and adults were treated. And certainly lifeguarding, and dealing with kids, men and women and young people, that all of the similarities with me and the kids that I taught, they were all poor.

With public defenders, you only work with people who are accused of crimes, whether or not they’ve done it. Generally, when the crimes are committed, they are crimes associated with poverty, like burglaries, armed robberies, or with mental health issues, untreated. The poor have very little access to mental health or drug addiction [treatment]. Again, very little access for poor people for ongoing addiction.

And the brokenness of families, which maybe is a residue or a present artifact of the destruction of families during the time of slavery. So many of the poor Black families, they were just matriarchal. A mother, her mother, her mother, and the babies who don’t get good role models for men. So, I just always was drawn to working with poor people, and with people who are broken, and that was what I did in my law practice.

JW:  Did you ever wind up doing any other women’s issues or girls’ issues, anything like that?

JCNS:  My first civil case as a lawyer, coming from the practice of public defender, where I knew a lot about murder and burglaries and sex crimes, I represented a woman in federal court on a pregnancy discrimination case. Now, I lost. It was tried to the judge, a judge I really respected. And again, I was such a rookie. I went up against a major employer in Salt Lake. I tried my best, and we lost.

Afterwards, the judge hand wrote me on his legal pad a letter telling me what a great job I had done in a losing case. It was the nicest letter from a federal judge complimenting this rookie civil lawyer. My law partners, they got it, and they framed it and hung it on my wall. It meant so much to me because I valued him, and I did try to advocate for this woman. But I had no pet litigation that was women-based.

Interestingly, what I did do as my pro bono cases, or my virtually almost pro bono, were legitimation cases, where men who had fathered children have no rights unless they go to court and legitimate those children. The mothers who give birth, even if they’re crack addicts or prostitutes, they are the legal custodian of the children. And in fact, my one remaining – after 45 years, I’ve retired, finally, had my last hearing like six months ago, I have one case left. It’s a legitimation case.

I became committed to keeping on my caseload pro bono cases of men who wanted legal custody of their children. So that they could visit them, so that they could have parenting time, so that they could be a part of the children’s life. And sometimes I would get physical custody for the men who were better parents than the mothers.

These were all poor, low-income men. They had fathered children who were never going to really know them because they had no rights to them. So that actually was a substantial part of what I would do, both for the men and for the children who needed the presence of a person who wanted to be their dad. They should have a right to that.

JW:  How would you say your case, those early days, affected you going forward, affected your career? Obviously, you were zealous, and I’m going to assume you continued to be on what you thought was the right thing.

JCNS:  One way is that it made me a better interviewer. I taught interviewing, counseling, and negotiating at the University of Georgia Law School for a number of years, and at John Marshall Law School for a number of years. Because in the trial of my case, the school district lawyer said, “Ms. Lafleur, was this your first baby?” And I said, “Yes, it was.” It didn’t come up again.

Outside on the courthouse stairs, I said to my lawyer, “I’m sure glad that Mr. X didn’t ask me if that my first pregnancy.” “What do you mean?” Well, earlier when I was teaching at the Catholic Elementary School, I became pregnant and had a miscarriage, which would have just supported perhaps, their hypothesis that teaching is dangerous. “See, she has already lost one baby. We’re trying to save her babies,” and they were completely unrelated. And she said, “Why didn’t you tell me?” And I said, “You never asked.” 

In my mind, a baby was different than a pregnancy, and I didn’t have any other children. That first miscarriage was not, in my view, a baby. And my obstetrician thought it was never going to be a baby. It was just a collection. It wasn’t a baby. But it taught me to be very clear about what you ask someone. Ask a question that covers everything. I don’t think the school board ever knew about that.

Besides keeping pro bono work, I think it helped my appreciation for how much lawyers can help the community shape itself into a better society, one vindicated right at a time. When I used to teach trial practice at Emory Law School every summer for, I don’t know, 12 or 15 years, I would use my class on the last day as an example. I said, “There’s some legal rights that only a lawyer can vindicate.” There are some legal rights that are being trampled on, that it takes a trial lawyer to do. The best salesman in the world can’t do it, the best architect, it takes a trial lawyer. Someone who, even if afraid, will walk into a court of law and say, “Your Honor, my client’s right to do X has been trampled on, has been stifled, and we’re here to persuade you that my client is entitled to X or Y.”

I think later examples of that would certainly be gay marriage, issues with transgendered folks that are still going on, women and sports, Title IX, things that have come up. There are always new ways in which people in power can trample people not in power, and it generally takes a lawyer to get the equitable relief that people who are trodden upon are entitled to.

A lot of it now, I think, is voting. We’re having a lot of issues around who can vote. What about absentee ballots? How long can we hold voting? Issues fundamental to democracy. But it has taken lawyers to file those petitions and file those complaints with courts of law. Even though there are lawyers on the other side trying to fight tooth and nail against them, which they’re entitled to do. Though sometimes I think if it’s not a winnable position, there’s an ethical rule that says you don’t get to do everything that a client tells you, if there’s no reasonable way that you can prevail. So, there’s still a need of enormous numbers of lawyers from local matters, ordinances, zoning. Why can’t there be a daycare in the home if it’s limited to, I don’t know, two or three people? This is how you earn your livelihood.

So, I just think there are many issues. I think I’ve become more diligent in looking for those, and reading about them, and commenting, and seeing if there’s anything that I can do. Do I know a friend who could help in this situation who has expertise? But all of this requires empathy. I think that’s the thing. Empathy is probably the best feature human beings can have. And I think I fought harder because I had an understanding of what my loss would mean to the children who sit in classrooms and want to learn, whose teachers are being yanked willy-nilly, and that it violates their rights to education, even as it violated my right to be a teacher. I don’t want to forget the people who are impacted by wrongful rules.

JW:  Any closing thoughts?

JCNS:  I will say, in a closing thought, I learned about my decision when I was teaching a class on death and dying at Lakewood High School. This is back in the days before cell phones and faxes and email and all that. I had a guest speaker that day in my class, and so I was sitting by, and a student came and said, “Ms. Lafleur, you have a phone call. There’s a reporter who wants to talk to you.” This was in January of 1974, and we had been awaiting the decision. I did not want to hear it from a newspaper reporter so I said, “No, tell him. I’ll call him back.”

I left the classroom and went and called my lawyer, and she said, “Oh, Jo Carol, we’ve just heard. We’ve won. I don’t even know the votes. All I know is that we’ve won.” She’s in Cleveland, so they’re going to have to have somebody in DC go and get a copy of it and read it to them. Those were different days. I was so excited, and I ran back to my classroom doing what I’d call grand jetés as a ballerina, dancing down the hallway. I went into the classroom, and my students knew I’d been waiting for this decision and I said to this gentleman who was talking about pre-planned funerals, I said, “Could I have just a moment?” And he said, “Well, Ms. Lafleur, it’s your class.” And I said, “We won. We won.” And they applauded, and they were so happy for me.

Now, every day that I was a teacher or a law professor, I had a quote of the day written on the board. It could be something like, If you’re not living life on the edge, you’re taking up too much space, or something like that. Or it may be that, Your only reason for existence is to be an object blessing to others. Or they may be kinder and sweeter, just more sentimental.

But one day that year, I had used the statement attributed to Vince Lombardi, the former Green Bay Packers football coach, in which he’s rumored to have said, Winning isn’t everything, It’s the only thing. Well, the day I put it up, I said, “Well, of course, that’s not true. It’s all about playing your best and doing all that you can. And if you win, you win.” Or, another quote, Win as though you’re used to it, lose as though it’s time for a change. So, I was deriding the quote.

That day, I had started off with another quote. But once I heard about our success, the rest of the day for all of my classes, the quote was, Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing, because sometimes you have to win. In the court of law, if I hadn’t won, teachers would have continued to have been put out of the classroom. So, there was no second place. Winning was the only thing. And my students appreciate it now that I could say this is a quote that rings true sometimes.

JW:  That’s fabulous. Oh, Thank you so much. This has just been wonderful.