Louisiana purchase: love of family inspired William Jefferson to do great things. it also explains that $90,000 in his freezer

Washington Monthly, April, 2008 by Jason Berry

But while Jefferson's upbringing was inspiring, it left scars. Jefferson became convinced that loyalty to family was paramount, no matter the cost. "The parents made him aware that he was responsible for the well-being of his brothers and sisters," says Katz.

Sweet Providence also left Jefferson with a hard-nosed view of power: it was something to be wrested from those who controlled it. In the early 1980s, Jefferson, then a state senator, used a revealing football metaphor in conversation with Raymond Strother, a political consultant who handled one of Jefferson's campaigns. "You white guys tackle each other and help the opponent up," Jefferson explained. "We were taught to tackle somebody and keep 'em from getting up."

If any years in Jefferson's biography suggest the better path he might have taken, it is those that he spent in college. Campus life brought out the idealism in Jefferson. Refused admission to West Point because of his race (no member of the state's then-all-white congressional delegation would sponsor him), he attended Southern University in Baton Rouge, a historically black college. Before long, he was elected student-body president. He dated an attractive Creole girl from New Orleans, Andrea Green, and the couple became stars on campus. In his last semester, in the spring of 1969, Jefferson led a protest over poor library facilities, tuition increases, and out-of-touch administrators. The event ignited larger demonstrations that attracted statewide media coverage and culminated in a visit from Governor John McKeithen, a backwoods populist undergoing a political shift and forging ties with black ministers. Jefferson met with the governor, who promised improvements to the campus.

A few months later, Jefferson vaulted to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to attend Harvard Law School, and join an academic milieu light years from that of Southern. As always, his approach to this new situation was to work hard. James Gray, a native of Baton Rouge and graduate of More-house College in Atlanta, studied with him. "Many a night, very late, when I was tired, thinking, 'Let me quit'--there's Jeff, still at it," Gray recalls. "So you sit and study more." (Jefferson did find time to marry Andrea, in 1970.)

Gray and Jefferson both believed that the gains of the civil rights movement had handed men like them a responsibility to give back to the community. When Gray graduated from Harvard Law, he eschewed job offers on Wall Street for a legal career in New Orleans. Jefferson clerked for a federal judge in New Orleans and later worked in Washington as a legislative assistant to Louisiana's then Senator J. Bennett Johnston. In 1976, Bill and Andrea Jefferson moved back to New Orleans, and Jefferson teamed up with Gray and another Harvard Law graduate, Trevor Bryan, a New Orleans native who had gone to Amherst as an undergraduate, to open a partnership focusing on civil cases. Unlike his partners, Jefferson was a country boy; his parents hadn't made it past elementary school. Yet he managed to turn his experience into an advantage. "No one could sit down and negotiate the way Jeff did," recalls Gray. Jefferson, Bryan, and Gray eventually grew into one of the largest African American law firms in the South.