Jean Camper Cahn

Jean Camper Cahn (May 26, 1935 – January 2, 1991) was an American lawyer and social activist who helped establish federal financing of legal services to the poor. Cahn was the first director of the National Legal Services Program in the O.E.O. and later founded the Urban Law Institute at George Washington University. In 1971, she co-founded the Antioch School of Law (now the David A. Clarke School of Law at the University of the District of Columbia) with her husband and law associate Edgar S. Cahn.

Early life Jean Camper was born on May 26, 1935, in Baltimore, Maryland. Her father, John Emory Toussaint Camper, was a civil rights activist and physician. Her mother, Florine Thompson, was a hairdresser. She grew up in Baltimore with her sister Elizabeth, and her two half-brothers and two half-sisters from her father's first marriage.

The Camper household was a regular meeting place for local NAACP figures and national civil rights leaders, such as Thurgood Marshall and her godfather Paul Robeson. Camper's father was known as "one of the most formidable men in black Baltimore." She would draw her inspiration from him, and from a series of personal incidents which would force her to confront racial injustice.

Camper was deeply affected when her younger brother, John Jr., suffering from a treatable ear infection, was refused treatment by Johns Hopkins University hospital because of his race. The hospital would eventually admit the boy, but only after the infection had spread, forcing doctors to remove part of his brain.

"They treated him like a monkey," Camper's mother would recall.

In 1950, Jean gained entrance into the prestigious Emma Willard School for Girls in New York on the recommendation of theologian Howard Thurman. Emma Willard would bring its own challenges: Many of the school's white students resisted her presence, some refusing to even live near her dormitory room. One girl told Jean that Jean's mother should be washing the floors of her house.

Other similar incidents served only to increase her fury at racial injustice. At a young age, "a good part of [Camper's] makeup got to be anger."

After graduating, Camper enrolled in Northwestern University, where she would live in an all-white student dormitory. While there, one of her friends enlisted Camper as a ghostwriter for a long-distance romance she was conducting. Jean would write the letters, her friend would copy them into her own hand, and then send them off to a boy at Swarthmore.

At the close of her first year, Camper was stricken with rheumatic fever and was forced to leave Northwestern to recuperate in Baltimore. When she recovered, she resumed her studies at Swarthmore College where she tracked down the recipient of her love letters: Her future husband, Edgar S. Cahn.

Marriage and The War on Poverty Jean and Edgar were married shortly after their graduation from Swarthmore. That same year she began her studies at Yale Law School, while her husband completed a PhD in English. He would also enroll at Yale Law School, finishing in 1963.

Jonathan, Jean's first child, was born the day of her first law school examination. Her second child, Reuben, was born while the couple was in England on a Fulbright fellowship.

Cahn earned her LLB in 1961, and the next year she and her husband were hired on a Ford Foundation grant to help run antipoverty programs in New Haven, Connecticut. She became associate general counsel for the New Haven Redevelopment Agency and staff attorney for the first neighborhood legal services program for the poor. The experience proved pivotal for Cahn herself as well as for the development of legal aid for the poor and for the course of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society antipoverty programs.

Based on her experience in New Haven, Cahn and her husband authored their famed 1964 Yale Law Journal essay, "The War on Poverty: A Civilian Perspective" which would lead to the creation of the Legal Services Corporation, a federally funded program that remained true to Cahn's original vision to "promote equal access to justice in our Nation and to provide high quality civil legal assistance to low-income persons" (Legal Services Corporation).

The Cahns' insistence that the poor be guaranteed legal counsel in civil cases was indeed new and radical. The piece impressed a number of figures in the Lyndon Johnson administration, especially Sargent Shriver, head of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO).

In 1963 the couple moved to Washington, D.C., where Jean Cahn had taken a position at the African Desk at the State Department and her husband went to work for Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

Jean Cahn then was hired by Shriver, who gave her responsibility for setting up the legal services program.