A former Tulane Law School professor who spent the better part of his life working to end racial and gender discrimination around the South has died at his New Orleans home after a long illness.
George M. Strickler, who taught at Tulane for 37 years before retiring in 2016, died Sept. 2 at the age of 80. Early in his life, while attending Southern Methodist University in Dallas in the early 1960s, he joined with other students at sit-ins at local eateries that wouldn’t serve Black customers.
“To him, the idea that these students had no place to eat was just …100 percent rude, and disrespectful, and for no other reason than they were Black,” Andrew Strickler, one of George’s sons, said in a prepared statement. “That stuck him hard, because for him it was 100 percent a moral question. That galvanized something in him and really energized the movement as well.”
After graduating from Yale Law school, he went on to become a professor at the University of Mississippi in Oxford and at the same time worked for a legal aid program that helped Black clients. When the university told Strickler and another attorney, Michael Trister, they couldn’t remain on the faculty while doing their legal aid work, the pair sued and prevailed in their case at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1969.
"Their focus at Ole Miss was on school desegregation," Tucker Carrington, associate dean of clinical programs at the School of Law, told the Louisiana Record. "They were causing trouble in the best possible way"
Strickler made an impression on many people during his life, according to a Tulane news release and an Associated Press obituary. Among them is University of Virginia professor Ann Woolhandler, who worked with Strickler as a young attorney.
“George was involved in a number of school desegregation cases, particularly in his work with the Lawyers’ Constitutional Defense Committee,” Woolhandler told the Record in an email. “Much of this was before I met him in 1976.”
Among these school desegregation cases was Hall v. St. Helena Parish School Board, in which the Fifth Circuit told multiple school boards in 1969 to replace their freedom-of-choice attendance plans in favor of school desegregation, she said.
In the field of employment discrimination, Strickler argued that the system for allocating grain work to Black employees was illegal in the 1982 Fifth Circuit case Williams v. New Orleans Steamship Association.
And in Kirchberg v. Feenstra, which went before the same court in 1979, Strickler worked to overturn sex discrimination practices. He successfully argued that a Louisiana Civil Code provision designating the husband as head and master of community property, such as a home, violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution, Woolhandler said.
When not practicing law, Strickler’s interests included duck hunting, dog training, photography and scuba diving. He is survived by two sons and his wife, Girardin.