The Hidden Wound - Review

Washington Monthly, March, 1999 by David J. Garrow

The story of a black lawyer who tried and failed to ignore his race

Paul Barrett's powerful and poignant book about the life and legal career of his one-time Harvard Law School roommate has lessons aplenty for anyone interested in affirmative action, employment litigation, or judicial racism.

Lawrence Mungin made it from a single-parent household in a Queens, New York, public housing project to Harvard College and then Harvard Law School before finally having to acknowledge the inescapability of race after joining the all-white Washington office of a Chicago-based law firm.

Mungin's reluctant acceptance of his own racial identity is the unifying theme of Barrett's sensitive but not uncritical portrait. But lurking just behind that theme is the fact that Mungin's decision to escape as completely as possible from the world in which he grew up left him a fundamentally isolated and lonely person. Barrett recognizes the "rootlessness" that characterized Mungin's early adult life, but Mungin's reserved nature, and Barrett's obvious respect for his friend, seems to have kept

Barrett from asking many potentially intrusive questions. Barrett is explicitly willing to question the wisdom of Mungin's decision to move to Katten Muchin & Zavis in 1992 after several unremarkable years of early law practice at the two well-known firms of Weil, Gotshal & Manges and Powell, Goldstein, Frazer & Murphy. Barrett suggests that notwithstanding all the energy and drive Mungin had demonstrated earlier in life (including four years of very successful Navy service), by the time Mungin graduated from law school he was "coasting" professionally as well as personally drifting. Barrett believes that an attentive and savvy young lawyer should have recognized just how potentially troubled the Washington office of Katten Muchin was before taking a job there, but even in retrospect Mungin resolutely disagrees.

The centerpiece of The Good Black is Larry Mungin's experience at Katten Muchin. Barrett's narrative implicitly emphasizes two distinct but not inconsistent themes: (1) many if not most large law firms often behave thoughtlessly and callously toward young lawyers, and (2) the ways in which Mungin was sometimes ignored and at other times demeaned at Katten Muchin can but need not necessarily be viewed or explained through a racial prism.

Barrett underscores both how Mungin's unhappy experience at Katten Muchin did not feature any "racist insults or overtly hostile acts" and the ways in which other lawyers--white lawyers--not directly acquainted with Larry Mungin automatically questioned his professional competence once he filed suit against Katten Muchin in 1994. In fact, no one with whom Mungin had worked, either at Katten Muchin or at his previous firms, appears to have ever doubted his professional abilities. Yet one former Katten Muchin partner who had never met Mungin told Barrett just what the problem was: "Anyone who spends any time in the profession would know that there are lots of minorities, African-Americans especially, who are running around with Harvard and Yale degrees who are not qualified in any sense. They have been solicited and tutored and polished up and sent out to the profession and they're not up to grade, for whatever reason."

Barrett observes that "[t]his is not an unusual opinion among white lawyers at Katten Muchin and other elite firms, merely one that is rarely articulated," especially to journalists. That same usually unspoken attitude can also be seen in many other forums--law school faculty hiring decisions, for example--but Barrett accurately notes that the erroneous assumption that a black man such as Mungin "was a Harvard affirmative action phony" was nothing more than "an example of raw stereotyping."

Mungin's performance as the first witness before a D.C. federal district court trial jury in March, 1996 was highly compelling. True, seven of the eight jurors were black, and Mungin's lead counsel, Abbey Hairston, consistently outperformed her opposite number, but both the lawyers and Barrett--the trial's only consistent spectator--were surprised when the jury deliberated for hardly two hours before returning with a remarkable verdict in Mungin's favor: $1 million dollars in compensatory damages and an additional $1.5 million dollars in punitive damages.

One of Barrett's most striking observations concerns how the case "transformed Mungin" from someone who previously had done his utmost to minimize and ignore racial or possibly racial slights into someone who for the first time in his life was comfortable expressing racial anger. "When this law firm wronged him, in his eyes," Barrett told an NBC "Today Show" interviewer this January, "the fury of thirty-five years came pouring out, not just the reaction to what had happened over a couple of years in a law firm." Mungin himself readily credited Barrett, more than his own willingness to go to court, with bringing about the change: "Paul forced me to take the blinders off, to acknowledge race is an issue," he told the National Law Journal.