Kellis Parker

Kellis Earl Parker (January 13, 1942 – October 10, 2000) was an American legal scholar and teacher, including as the first African-American professor at Columbia Law School, civil rights activist, and jazz trombonist.

Early life and education, 1942-1969

Early years (1942-1960) Kellis Parker was born in Kinston, North Carolina. His parents, Maceo Parker Sr. and Novella Parker, ran the East End Dry Cleaners, the only African-American-owned dry cleaners in the county. When Kellis' father first attempted to open the dry cleaning establishment, local white businessmen did not welcome the competition, and he was beaten by police, arrested on a false charges of selling moonshine, convicted in a 15-minute trial, and imprisoned for two years, events that Kellis would cite decades later as a law professor.

Kellis and his siblings learned music from their parents (both parents sang in church, and their father also played piano and drums), and Kellis formed a jazz trio with two younger brothers—Kellis on trombone, Maceo Jr. on trumpet, and Melvin on drums—starting when one of the three was in fifth grade. The trio was called the Blue Note Juniors, named for a band in which their uncle played called Bobby Butler and the Mighty Blue Notes; the Blue Note Juniors would play during intermissions of that band's shows.

When he was in high school, as the leader of his (segregated) school's band, Parker successfully convinced the Kinston Chamber of Commerce to stop putting African-American marching bands at the back of parades. He was active in the student chapter of the NAACP, and led campus and local civil rights activism. For example, Parker organized demonstrations that helped desegregate UNC facilities, and he coordinated the boycott of a movie theater in Durham that refused to integrate.

In August 1963, apparently as a college prank on the Durham County Citizens Council, a white supremacist organization, someone enrolled Parker as a member. This event was noted with amusement in regional news stories, which pointed out that the group's membership application had no place to indicate race. One story described Parker as a student "known as a leader in civil rights demonstrations in his hometown. He also is a member of the executive council of Citizens United for Racial Equality and Dignity (CURED), an integrationist group of students."

In addition to being a civil rights activist, Parker was also a leader among students. He was selected as Secretary of the YMCA for the 1963–64 school year. In 1962, Parker was one of five U.S. delegates who traveled to Lavardia, Greece, with his hometown raising funds for his travel, as the first African-American undergraduate delegate to the United Nations International Students Conference. Parker was chairman of the Collegiate Council of the UN at Carolina, and, according to the student paper, "a leading figure in the UN Model Assembly." He was a member of two university honorary societies that recognize exemplary students, the Order of the Grail and the Order of the Old Well.

Parker worked his way through college as a musician, playing with acts including Martha and the Vandellas and James Brown.

Law school and clerkship (1965-1969) Parker attended Howard Law School from 1965 to 1968. He graduated first in his class, was editor-in-chief of the Howard Law Journal, and was editor of the student newspaper, The Barrister.

Parker regularly played his trombone in law school classes to illustrate a point. Ruth Phillips, a law professor who had been both a public defender and a concert pianist, wrote that Parker established a jazz-based model for lawyering and advocacy: "Parker proposed jazz as critical method. Jazz as collaboration, disagreement, and dissonance, mediated by the soloist, with soloism understood as a personal, passionate autobiography. He saw in jazz an inclusive enterprise, which informed his political work in a profound and personal way. "

Parker mentored a generation of Columbia Law students, particularly students of color. One, New York First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, said about Parker, "He took care of us. He watched over us. He made a way for us."

During student protests at Columbia in 1996, Parker earned widespread praise for his leadership in defusing the situation by talking with protesting students, acting as an advisor to them, and helping them both achieve their goals and avoid legal trouble. For example, Professor Robert O'Meally, who founded and led Columbia's Center for Jazz Studies, wrote that "the quiet resolution of that issue . . . was substantially due to his quiet professionalism, his calm under pressure, his humor, his energy for negotiation, his eloquence, his concern for the curriculum and his more profound concern for those brave youngsters who finally did win the day for all of us." According to fellow professor Eben Moglen, Parker's actions "helped save this university from a conflagration."

Scholarship In 1975, Parker published Modern Judicial Remedies: Cases and Materials, described as "the first casebook to introduce civil rights remedies into the law school curriculum." Articles he wrote include "Standing and Public Law Remedies," "Ideas, Affirmative Action, and the Ideal University," and "Law and the Black Experience: A Minority Report."

Columbia Law professor Kendall Thomas wrote that "Kellis Parker's work as an intellectual was informed by a vision of how the law looks from the standpoint of those who are on bottom of the social order."

His scholarship "used jazz as a framework for interpreting the law." O'Meally, the jazz scholar, explained that Parker "conceived of the music, not only jazz but its antecedents in ragtime, blues, spirituals, as providing uniquely sharp, broad lenses through which to examine American history. For him, the music itself comprised a set of invisible laws of the American community, notably the black U.S. community; rules and values, stances and attitudes (some of which cannot be put into words but only into sound and cadence) that have sustained our group and which told an otherwise untold story of struggle and sacrifice and violence and perseverance." Along these lines, Parker posited that African-Americans use improvisation in order to follow a higher law, saying, "The law that sent my daddy to jail was not the law we respected." although another source states (about Kellis's brother Maceo) that they are unrelated.

Parker had five children: Kimberly, Shilla, Emily, Kellis Jr., and Kai. Kellis Parker Jr., now known as Kellindo, is the lead guitarist and a songwriter for Janelle Monáe, and has also worked with Prince, Stevie Wonder, No Doubt, Bruno Mars, and Earth, Wind & Fire, and as a solo artist.

Parker died on October 10, 2000, at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York City, of acute respiratory distress syndrome, which struck him in late September 2000.