Ann Fagan Ginger, Tireless Defender of Civil Liberties, Dies at 100

In early October 1964, Ann Fagan Ginger, an editor at the law school of the University of California, Berkeley, was walking across campus when she saw a large crowd gathered around a police car.

A student, Jack Weinberg, had been arrested for participating in a civil rights demonstration on campus; he sat in the back of the car. On its roof stood another student, Mario Savio, addressing the crowd.

When Mr. Savio got down, Ms. Ginger urged him to remind those in the crowd of their rights to assembly and speech should the police try to arrest them, too. He told her that she should do it — so she did.

A photo of the diminutive woman atop a police car, surrounded by a rapt audience, appeared in newspapers around the country.

Alarmed, the university urged the F.B.I. to investigate her. But the bureau didn’t need to be told. By then, it already had a thick file on Ms. Ginger, a venerable figure in civil liberties activism, who died on Aug. 20 at her home in Berkeley.

Her death was announced by the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, a legal nonprofit she founded in 1965.

At 100, Ms. Ginger was among the last of a generation of lawyers and activists who weathered McCarthyism and the Red Scare, and then helped train a new cohort during the 1960s and after.

Over her long life, she involved herself in the legal side of many of the major progressive movements of the past century: labor activism in the 1930s, civil rights in the 1950s, antiwar marches in the 1960s, feminism in the 1970s, nuclear disarmament in the 1980s and, in the 2000s, the excesses of the war on terror.

Keeping a busy schedule suited her, she told The Salt Lake Tribune in 1988. “Occasionally, I do some folk dancing,” she added.

Through the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, named for the legal scholar and free-speech advocate Alexander Meiklejohn, she built a library of documents related to civil liberties cases, filed amicus briefs and trained law students in what she called “peace law,” an amalgamation of constitutional law, human rights law and international law.

The civil liberties lawyer Michael E. Tigar, who worked as her research assistant when he was a law student at Berkeley, said in an interview that Ms. Ginger “had this invaluable gift of seeing the civil rights and civil liberties struggles in the context of decades of activity by lawyers acting on behalf of clients who needed their help. That sense of history was an invaluable lesson for me.”

Ann Fagan was practically born into left-wing activism on July 11, 1925, in East Lansing, Mich. Her parents ran a weekly labor newspaper, and when Ann was old enough, they enlisted her to help operate the linotype machine in their printing room.

Her father, Peter, came from rural Quaker stock and had earlier worked as a secretary to Helen Keller; her mother, Sarah (Robinson) Fagan, was from an urban Jewish family.

“We were the town radicals,” Ms. Ginger told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1977.

She married Ray Ginger in 1944, graduated from the University of Michigan in 1945 and received a degree from its law school in 1947.

By then, she was active with the National Lawyers Guild, which offered legal assistance to labor and civil rights activists. That left-leaning affiliation did not help her, but finding a job with a law firm would have been difficult in any case: At the time, female lawyers were almost unheard of.

Instead, she picked up solo work, first in the Detroit area and then in Cleveland, where Mr. Ginger — already well known for his biography of the labor leader Eugene V. Debs — was pursuing a doctorate in history at Western Reserve (now Case Western Reserve) University.

In 1951, the Gingers moved to Cambridge, Mass., where Mr. Ginger found a job teaching and editing at Harvard Business School.

Three years later, Harvard asked Mr. Ginger to sign a statement swearing that he was not and never had been a member of the Communist Party. The school demanded the same oath from Ms. Ginger, even though she did not work there.

Word had reached the university that the couple was about to be called before the Massachusetts Special Commission to Study and Investigate Communism, a state-level version of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Harvard insisted (and continued to insist, decades later) that there were no repercussions for employees who declined to sign such statements. But when the Gingers refused, the university forced Mr. Ginger to resign.

In exchange for a few weeks’ worth of severance, the school also demanded that Mr. and Ms. Ginger, who was eight months pregnant, leave the state immediately — likely to save Harvard from the embarrassment of seeing its former employee called before the anti-Communist commission.

“All I know is that Friday morning I got on a train with my 3 1/2-year-old and baggage, leaving my house in a total disarray and having hired somebody to come and pick up the papers and pack them,” she told The Harvard Crimson in 2000. “We went to stay with my brother-in-law’s parents in New York, whom I had never met.”

She gave birth to their second son a few weeks later, at a charity hospital.

While Mr. Ginger tried to find work — which was not easy, as he had been essentially blacklisted — Ms. Ginger worked part time for the National Lawyers Guild, eventually becoming the editor of its main journal, The Guild Practitioner.

She also continued to work with a handful of clients from her time in Cleveland. They included four defendants who claimed to have been entrapped by Ohio’s un-American activities committee, which found them in contempt for refusing to answer questions about their political affiliations.

In 1959, Ms. Ginger argued the case before the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned three of the contempt decisions.

By then, she had divorced Mr. Ginger and moved to Berkeley with their two children. Her second marriage, to James Fenton Wood, also ended in divorce.

She is survived by her younger son, James. Her older son, Thomas — like his mother, a lawyer with the National Lawyers Guild — died in 1998. Ms. Ginger’s longtime companion, J.R. Challacombe, died in 2020.

In Berkeley, Ms. Ginger quickly established herself as a force in the left-leaning legal community around the Bay Area. She created The Civil Liberties Docket, a newsletter about recent civil liberties litigation, and began to build a library of civil liberties cases — the origins of the Meiklejohn Institute.

Along with running the institute, she taught at Hastings College of the Law (now the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco) and lectured nationwide, well into the 2010s.

In December 2000, Ms. Ginger wrote to Harvard, demanding an apology for its treatment of her and her ex-husband, who died in 1975.

Three months later, Sharon Gagnon, the president of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, sent Ms. Ginger a letter expressing “sympathy and regret” over the “hardship and anguish” the Gingers had experienced, but not admitting any wrongdoing by the school.

Ms. Ginger said the letter was insufficient, in part because it did not address her call for an additional statement outlining “Harvard’s present policies in the event of another repressive period.”

Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.

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