MORRIS ABRAM
(Morris Berthold Abram)
Many fighters for civil rights split from the majority of the Black leadership over racial preferences for affirmative action.
Morris Berthold Abram was an American lawyer, civil rights activist, and for two years president of Brandeis University. In 1953 he successfully sought the Democratic nomination for Congress from the Fifth District in Georgia, urging the desegregation of schools but lost the election in 1954. He may be best remembered as a civil rights attorney who successfully waged a fourteen year struggle from 1949–63 to end a Georgia electoral rule that gave disproportionate weight in primary elections to vote counts in white rural areas at the expense of those cast by urban blacks. When the rule was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1963, he briefed Attorney General Robert Kennedy who argued the case.
