Law Practice
Jun. 25, 2002
Leftist Attorney Beverly Axelrod
SAN FRANCISCO - Beverly Axelrod, a radical lawyer whose personal and professional links to Eldridge Cleaver drove her from the profession, has died at age 78 at her Pacifica home.
The cause of her death Wednesday was emphysema, the result of a four-pack-a-day cigarette habit, her son Douglas said Friday.
He described his mother as "a revolutionary who moved to leftist" over the decades. During the last 25 years she was on inactive status with the State Bar, working as managing partner of Ace Investigations, the Pacifica detective agency she founded.
Axelrod's résumé is a roll call of mid-20th century activist causes.
She joined the National Lawyers Guild in 1948. She walked Louisiana parishes to register black voters in 1953 as an attorney for the Congress on Racial Equality. She did legal work for the United Farm Workers. In 1965 she traveled to Vietnam to organize antiwar protests. In the 1960s she was present at the founding of the Black Panther Party.
Axelrod never charged clients for her political work, her son said.
"She was a principled and courageous person who got so involved in the movement she gave her whole life to it," said San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan.
"She's one of the giants," said San Francisco attorney Marvin Stender, who worked on prison law cases with Axelrod in the 1960s. "She carved out an area of law that lawyers just weren't doing, and of course it was all more difficult because she was a woman."
Stender recalled working with Axelrod on a conditions-of-confinement case on San Quentin's death row in the late 1960s when hostile guards arrested her for exchanging legal documents with clients.
"The goon squad locked her in a room for about three hours. They hated lawyers doing this kind of work, and they hoped it would discourage her."
It didn't. "When she got out she said she welcomed getting even a minimal taste of what her clients lived 24 hours a day," Stender said.
Axelrod's love letters and political correspondence with Cleaver while he was an inmate at Folsom Prison formed the basis for his best-selling "Soul on Ice," which she helped edit and for which she found a publisher. Her advocacy led to Cleaver's release on parole in 1966.
She picked him up at the prison gates and the pair spent a romantic idyll at the Mendocino coastal home of leftist San Francisco attorney Doris Walker.
"It was their honeymoon, though they were never married," Walker said Friday. "She was fully capable of doing her best job as a lawyer even as she was falling in love with him."
Cleaver lived with Axelrod at her home in the upper Haight district. With them were Douglas and Clay, her sons by a 1952 marriage to educator Marshall Axelrod that ended in divorce in 1964. Clay died several years ago.
Earlier she was married briefly to Seymour Lourd. She graduated from Brooklyn Law School in Brooklyn, N.Y., and was admitted to the California bar in 1954. Her birth name was Beverly Jarrett.
At school she met fellow student Leonard Garment, who later became Richard Nixon's personal lawyer. She credited Garment with introducing her to jazz music and leftist politics.
"Eldridge was a really nice guy," Douglas said. "But that famous Huey Newton picture? That was taken in my room, and that was my chair, my spear and my rug," Douglas Axelrod said, referring to an iconic photo of the Panther leader as warrior. "The Panthers didn't have any African stuff."
Lawyers were astonished by Axelrod's liaison with a notorious client.
"She crossed a lot of lines," said Robert Buechler, a business partner at Ace Investigations. "Her affair broke the rules, and she was completely public and open about it."
Stender said the couple represented the dashed expectations of leftist lawyers' identification with underprivileged clients.
"When middle-class people got overinvolved with convicts, you had disappointment," he said. "This was almost a definitional situation, and there was a sad outcome."
The affair soured after about two years. In December 1967, Cleaver married Kathleen Neal. He tried to cancel a document assigning one-fourth of his "Soul on Ice" royalties to Axelrod, launching lengthy litigation in which Walker served as Axelrod's attorney.
"He fought us tooth and toenail," Walker said. "But it was a legally enforceable assignment, and to this day Axelrod receives twice-a-year royalty checks. I made sure she made a will, so her heirs will get them too. And I get a small percentage of that, as my fee."
Despite the legal battle, Axelrod remained loyal to Cleaver - at least in public, Buechler said.
"I never heard her criticize him," Buechler said. "Her position was that the left was under attack by so many forces that she wouldn't display an internal division even if she had a beef with him."
The end of the relationship with Cleaver coincided with a rise in what Axelrod saw as political repression in the United States against the Panthers and other leftist groups, her son said.
Axelrod decided to close her practice.
"She was brokenhearted by Eldridge, and she also felt that to continue to work within the court system was too big a compromise," Douglas said.
Axelrod did political work in New Mexico, then traveled to Grenada and Italy for several years of rest and reflection, he said.
She returned to the Bay Area in 1975 and worked for three years as an administrative law judge for the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board.
Axelrod's legacy of criminal defense work inspired a new generation of female attorneys, said Susan Rutberg, a professor of law and the director of the criminal litigation clinic at Golden Gate University School of Law.
"Beverly Axelrod was a courageous criminal defense lawyer at a time when there were very few women in the profession," Rutberg wrote in an e-mail Friday.
In 1978 Axelrod founded Ace Investigations from her small red bungalow on a cliff over the Pacific.
"This was soon after the Freedom of Information Act was passed, and Beverly saw it as a way to get information to the left," Buechler said. The company concentrated on post-conviction criminal work.
"She oversaw the cases, and we did the legwork," said Buechler. As her health declined and she was forced to breathe from an oxygen tank, her zest for the job remained undiminished, he said.
"Her advice on how to proceed strategically was consistently brilliant," he said. "She knew what our lawyer clients needed."
Plans for a memorial service were pending, Douglas Axelrod said.
Staff writer Matthew King contributed to this story.
John Roemer
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