Remembering Phil Kaplan

Steve Barnes

Phil Kaplan, one of Arkansas’s best-known attorneys, had a passion for several things. At the top of the list: his wife, Ruthe, their two children and three grandkids. Bow ties, books, Asian cuisine. The law. Human rights and human dignity. Freedom of thought, to include freedom from censorship; and freedom of religion, to include freedom from religion — and the strict separation of church and state that he believed in his bones was essential to the preservation of both thought and religion.

He was passionate as well about classical music, so when journalist Ernie Dumas e-mailed some sad but unsurprising news last Friday to the pals with whom both men had a standing weekly lunch date, he needed but two crisp sentences: “Our great friend Phil Kaplan died early this morning. While listening to Verdi, I hope.”

One would expect a man in his 80s to lose some hair, and Phil did, and to lose his intellectual vitality, but Phil did not. The cranial hemorrhage of some months ago had no effect, none, on his native curiosity, his appetite for ideas and people, but it slowed his step substantially and, worse, robbed him of speech. Frustrated to tears at his lingering inability to verbally joke and joust and otherwise opine with kin and colleagues, Phil is said to have told his wife of 62 years that he “wanted to go.” Nonetheless, a longtime confidant, retired surgeon Joe Crow, was taken aback: “I never thought it would be this quick.”

“He was a pleasure to practice law with and a delightful companion,” said his former partner, veteran bond counsel Jack Williams. “I will miss him very much.”

“A great crusader for social justice.” —Bobby Roberts, onetime chair of the Arkansas prison board.

“A great advocate, a great friend,” — former State Rep. Mike Wilson of Jacksonville, a brother of the Bar.

“We were blessed to know him.” — Richard Weiss, retired director of the state Department of Finance and Administration.

“He lived a blessed and exemplary life,” added former State Sen. Bill Walmsley of Batesville.

“He changed Arkansas,” said retired state Supreme Court justice Robert Brown. “What a legacy!”

These men, who themselves had spent careers steering Arkansas government and politics, said these things unprompted, and they said them from respect and admiration for a Massachusetts native who had made his way south to Arkansas longer than a half-century ago, and who had devoted his years to making what another civil right crusader, the late Congressman John Lewis of Georgia, called “good trouble.”

The afflictions Phil Kaplan helped visit on his adopted state were several, if in reality self-inflicted:

• Appointed by a federal district judge in the 1960s to investigate and document conditions in Arkansas’s prisons, Phil Kaplan was instrumental in reforming a staggeringly barbaric system. (Only weeks ago died his dear friend and companion in the effort, former Supreme Court chief justice Jack Holt, Jr.)

• With John Walker and Richard Mays, his partners in Arkansas’s first racially integrated law firm, Kaplan was a relentless advocate for the rights of black children in public schools. The men remained friends after their firm dissolved, and even when their legal strategies put them at odds with one another in the courtroom.

• When, in the 1980s, the General Assembly adopted a law requiring public schools to “balance” biology with theology when addressing the origins of life, Phil and Co. so thoroughly destroyed the state’s defense of the statute that the U.S. district judge who heard the case privately remarked that the plaintiff’s counsel had all but written his decision for him.

• Workers who believed they had been wronged by an employer, treated unfairly or dismissed without just cause, often appeared at Kaplan’s door, which he almost always held open. Discrimination on the basis of skin got under his skin. So did discrimination involving ethnicity or religion, or age or gender or sexual orientation.

There were no empty seats at Congregation B’nai Israel for Phil Kaplan’s memorial, which an old ally described as an “amazing, uplifting service,” alternately “tearful, moving, funny.” There was always a basis in human affairs for gratitude, the rabbi observed, even when the times and the loss of a key player suggested otherwise. Why, just look at the opportunities for the good fight that Phil relished, for the mission on behalf of decency and justice, knowledge and compassion and understanding, that the legislature and the governor had only this year provided.

The crowd roared.