Carol Ruth Silver, a founding attorney of California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA)’s McFarland and Delano offices, reflected on decades of civil rights work during a 60th anniversary celebration Tuesday evening in McFarland.
The event, hosted by CRLA, marked six decades of community lawyering in a city that was home to their first office in the 1960s, a pivotal period in Kern County history.
In her remarks, she traced her activism back to the Freedom Rides—interracial bus journeys in 1961 across the American South aimed at opposing segregation in bus terminals and challenging the systemic failure to uphold Supreme Court rulings that had declared segregation in interstate transportation unconstitutional.
“I heard this deep, resonant voice saying, ‘you should be a freedom rider, and we need you to come to Mississippi, to Alabama, and to help us kill the segregation monster, the monster that had grown up called the Jim Crow laws of the United States,’” said Silver.
For her participation, Silver was arrested and held at Parchman Prison for 40 days. During that time, she documented her experiences on hidden scraps of paper, which she later turned into her book Freedom Rider Diary: Smuggled Notes from Parchman Prison.
After the Freedom Rides, Silver attended law school and organized the Civil Rights Research Council. As part of that work, she was sent to Durham, North Carolina, where she met civil rights attorney Floyd McKissick. He assigned her to go to Washington, D.C., to advocate for the inclusion of legal services in federal anti-poverty legislation.
In Washington, Silver met with Jim Lorenz, a founding attorney of CRLA, and Gary Bello, CRLA’s vice president. Together, they worked to advance an amendment as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty legislation.
“I joined with Jim Lorenz and Gary Bello and a bunch of other lawyers who had already put before the Congress of the United States an amendment, a little itty bitty amendment to the war on poverty legislation that had been proposed by Johnson. And that little itty bitty two-word amendment was to include, along with psychological counseling, education, all the goodies that were supposed to be in the opportunity that was being given in the war on poverty, legal services. That was all you had to do, just one little amendment,” said Silver.
The effort succeeded. In 1965, the amendment was passed, making legal services a formal component of the War on Poverty.
After completing her internship, Silver returned to California, where Lorenz asked her to establish a CRLA office in Delano. However, due to the controversy surrounding the Delano grape strike, CRLA leadership decided against opening an office there and instead directed her to find another nearby location.
“By the time I got here physically to Delano in my little red car, I got a call from Jim Lorenz…We can’t have an office with the address of Delano, California. Why not? Because all of the Congress people in the state of California were in bed with all the growers. The growers were seen as the engine of California’s prosperity and if we were going to do something that they didn’t like, we weren’t going to get any money,” said Silver.
Silver ultimately chose a site at Third and Perkins streets in McFarland, where CRLA established its first office.
“The minute that we opened the door and said ‘free legal assistance available for people who can’t afford it,” people who had never had any sense that they had rights, that they could do anything about their situation, whether they were immigration problems and divorce problems,” said Silver.
Initially, CRLA was not focused on handling domestic cases. Silver noted that early on, their goal was to take on large, high-impact cases.
“We did not want to have that experience of mountains of little cases, little consumer cases, little various other kinds of cases. We wanted to be heroes…We wanted to do things that would make us feel like heroes, that would do good things for lots of people…What happened was we figured it out, we used some of that legal talent to figure out how to do all those little cases and at the same time do the law reform cases,” noted Silver.
Among those broader efforts was a challenge to the “man in the house” rule, a 1960s welfare policy that withheld AFDC benefits from families if a capable adult male lived with the mother. The policy was enforced through invasive home inspections, and families could lose their welfare benefits if found in violation. CRLA, along with a number of plaintiffs, successfully challenged the rule in court.
CRLA’s anniversary event highlighted the organization’s early history in McFarland and its role in expanding access to legal services for low-income communities. Sixty years after its founding, the organization continues to provide legal assistance and pursue cases addressing housing, labor, and public benefits across California. The Delano CRLA office is located at 622 High St., for more information about services, call 661-725-4350.
