For decades before he joined the bench, Tatel fought for school integration, legal aid for the poor, Title IX, the environment, voting rights and more. For most of his career, he did so without the modern audio devices the visually impaired use today. Instead, he relied on primitive gadgets like a “Braille ’n Speak” computer, human readers and a prodigious memory.
Tatel was not always blind. As he recounts in his extraordinary memoir, “Vision,” he remembers the “Whites Only” signs in the shops near his childhood home in suburban D.C.; his high school’s basement shooting range (rifles, ammo and targets courtesy of the U.S. Army); the stars he could almost see through his father’s telescope. In 1954 — the year of Brown v. Board of Education, the addition of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and his bar mitzvah preparations — a ball he couldn’t see hit him in the face. The doctors advised him to eat more carrots. Eventually, one diagnosed retinitis pigmentosa, which causes gradual vision loss.
Ashamed of his dimming vision, Tatel devised secret workarounds. He drove at night guided by headlights and taillights. He surreptitiously brushed elbows with friends as he crossed streets. He wrote with thick black pens, until he could no longer see his notes.
“Vision” is at once a legal history of the last half-century and a story of blindness and enlightenment. In the 1960s, along with marches and sit-ins and the Voting Rights Act, there are girls-only university curfews and men-only commuter flights (cigars and stewardesses included). It’s a world mostly without ramps or audible “walk” signals. Tatel notices only in retrospect the immense invisible labor of his wife, Edie, who manages the household and family while working toward her own academic career. And he learns only belatedly not to be ashamed of his blindness.
While he grows more enlightened, American justice doesn’t. In Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Louis, Tatel proves that officials deliberately strove to circumvent Brown and preserve segregation. (One school district boasts that by remaking the district’s boundaries it can “take all the colored out.”) In North Carolina, he exposes the discriminatory state funding that has starved historically Black colleges and universities, leaving them with decrepit buildings, broken typewriters and worn-out books. He wins case after case. Yet nearly everywhere, segregation and gross inequality persist.
