The Fire Down Below
For more than three decades, Eric Vickers has been lighting brushfires, crusading against the racism he sees around him. Now, the civil-rights lawyer and activist finds himself burned.
He found solace in his Muslim faith, a religion he had converted to while in Virginia. "This brother who had no idea I had failed the bar came up to me at the mall," Vickers recalls. "We talked for a short while, and out of nowhere he told me it was truly hard to know the difference between a blessing and a curse until God reveals it to us at a later day. I really felt like I was getting a message from Allah to keep me strong and moving forward. I learned to hold my head up high, and the second time I took [the exam], I passed."
Nevertheless, Vickers holds racism responsible for his first bar-exam failure. He notes that a lawsuit, filed years earlier, accused the Missouri Bar Association of purposefully failing a greater number of blacks on the bar exam. The suit, however, was dismissed for lack of evidence. When pressed, Vickers admits that he has no real evidence, either, but remains steadfast in his view: "I knew I was prepared. I just don't believe I really failed it."
In 1984, after working for Bryan Cave, Vickers struck out on his own and established Vickers, Moore and Wiest, a small firm in the Central West End. Even as the law practice kept him busy, his passion for justice had him fighting on different fronts, and by his own admission, he was spread way too thin. "I was doing a lot of things I believed in very much," Vickers says. "I stretched myself, and in doing that I opened the door that made me vulnerable."
Almost immediately, he started taking difficult criminal cases and even more complicated civil-rights cases.
Eddie Hasan was president of the St. Louis Minority Contractors Association when he received a letter from a young black attorney named Eric Vickers. "The letter inspired me," Hasan says. "I knew this was the kind of guy I could get behind. He had energy, could articulate an issue, and he showed no fear. He was the missing link in the battle we were waging to get equal consideration for contracts. He had a voice and a legal arm." A year later, when Hasan became director of MO-KAN, a minority-contractor-advocacy group, Vickers became its legal arm. It was the first time he was able to fuse his legal expertise with his activisim. He branched out to other cities as well, fighting for minority contractors in Texas, Florida and other states. As if that wasn't enough, he did more. While doing legal work for MO-KAN, organizing strikes and maintaining a legal practice, he stepped into another role that would prove more demanding than all the others combined: Vickers became the city attorney for East St. Louis under the colorful and controversial Mayor Carl Officer.
Officer and Vickers were childhood friends but had lost touch for some years. Then Officer heard about the ambitious young lawyer who took on Francis Touchette, the political boss of St. Clair County. "It was his own little fiefdom," Officer says. "Everyone had to pay to be a part of it, usually through a campaign donation. It was kind of like a tithe, except God doesn't fire you if you don't pay up." One woman refused to pay and was fired. Vickers took her case and won her job back. "I heard about him winning against Touchette because everyone was talking about it, and I thought, 'That's the kind of lawyer we need,'" says Officer.
By the time Vickers came on board in 1988, Officer was into his third term and had a reputation not only as one of the youngest mayors in the nation but also as a provocateur. Officer had rocked the white St. Clair County Democratic machine. His own behavior, which included unstrapping a shoulder-holstered 9mm pistol before delivering a speech to schoolchildren and promising to support a new hospital obstetrical unit by fathering as many children as possible, only made matters worse. Officer and Vickers found themselves locked in an all-out war with federal, state and local officials, mostly white. "I got a call from a judge right before I started working for East St. Louis, and he told me if I represented Carl and the city that it would ruin my professional career," Vickers says. "He was being kind."
"It was like I was the mayor of Beirut," Officer says with a laugh, "and everyone from the Justice Department to the state's attorney to the FBI were throwing Scud missiles our way. We had the EPA, the CIA, every A you can think of looking over our shoulder. Eric and I had us some adventures." In one such adventure, Officer and Vickers were hauled off to jail in handcuffs for contempt of court after missing a court appearance in a case involving city sewers. Another time, the two went for a routine hearing in that case but, by the time they left the courthouse in Belleville, learned that Judge Roger Scrivner had awarded the East St. Louis City Hall to settle a $3.4 million judgment. A jury had found the city liable for the injuries sustained by Walter DeBow, an inmate who was beaten by another prisoner in the city jail. "It was like going in for a traffic ticket and coming out convicted of murder," says Officer. Already jailed once for contempt of court, the two saved the swearing for the drive back home. "I was threatening to arm every citizen of East St. Louis to keep them from taking City Hall," Officer says. Reminded that his own bodyguards always carried automatic weapons, he laughs and adds, "Yeah, and I was planning on putting them on the front line."
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