Two bar solution?

The 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C., has come and gone in these pages, with little more than a letter exchange between two New Yorkers about whether The Florida Bar should take pride in the racial and ethnic identification of its president as an African-American.

Attorneys of color do not seem to be weighing in on that issue, or any other with The Florida Bar. What should be clear by now is that the Bar has not and will never be an integrated Bar in the traditional sense of that word.

The time may be at hand to start over. Perhaps there could be a two-Bar solution--two separate but equal organizations. Each would be an arm of the Florida Supreme Court. Each would get half of the fees, instead of the current arrangement. Under a new system, an attorney could choose to be monitored by The Florida Bar or the Alternative Bar.

The Bar previously has been willing to recognize organizations for minority lawyers, to some extent. The Bar gave a whoop and a holler for Evett Simmons, one of its members, when she was elected president of the National Bar Association. Of course, neither Ms. Simmons nor any other African-American woman has headed The Florida Bar, and none is in sight to do so. And the Bar did show equal enthusiasm when Daryl Parks, a black male, headed the NBA a few years ago. But that is all the more reason to set up a separate but equal bar.

On September 1, the News ran a photo of The Young Lawyers Division's Board of Governors. I counted more than 40 faces. Several were African-American women. I did not see a single African-American male. Beneath that photo was a separate one of 11 male and female members of the Florida Muslim Bar Association.

Elsewhere in the edition, among the 32 faces peering out from the News and Notes section were two African-American women --one of them had been selected as president, the other president-elect of the Wilkie D. Ferguson, Jr., Bar Association. That's the kind of organization which would benefit from a different dues arrangement.

In News and Notes, there also were two black men--one is the ubiquitous Joseph Hatchett, the first black Florida Supreme Court justice. He was being honored by being given the annual NAACP's William Robert Ming Advocacy Award. Another black male appeared because he served on a panel about "Voter's Rights Act--Where Do We Go from Here?"

Where this organization should go is back to the drawing board to take into account that the Bar continues...