Isaiah ‘Skip’ Gant photographed at his office
The walls in Isaiah “Skip” Gant’s office talk, but it helps to have him there to translate.
On a recent afternoon, he sits in his corner of the offices of the federal Public Defender for the Middle District of Tennessee, sinking into a large leather couch and easily unspooling his memories of more than 40 years as a criminal defense attorney. The names of judges, clients, country towns and courthouses come easily to him.
Hanging on the wall to his left is a framed courtroom sketch of a young Gant pointing up at a judge who’s angrily leaning down from the bench. A strip of paper on top of the sketch has “$1,000” scrawled on it. It commemorates the time a Chicago judge held Gant in contempt, fined him a grand and threw him in jail. (The story is long and colorful and terrific, but best told by the man himself. Gant insists he never pointed at the judge, but concedes the two had a history.)
The seeds of his interest in the profession were planted by his Aunt Polly, who used to tell him, when he was a young boy, “You talk so much you oughta be a lawyer.” The Gants lived in Joplin, Mo., in the early 1950s. The Gant children — Skip and two siblings, a brother and sister — were the only black students at the Catholic grade school they attended. White students hit them with racial slurs as well as fists, but the Gant siblings never backed down.
“After you take so many ass-whoopings, another one doesn’t mean anything,” he says. “What are they gonna do?”
But even at a young age, Gant was well-aware of where racist violence could lead. He was in grade school when 14-year-old Emmett Till was famously lynched in Mississippi.
“Every black mother was telling black sons, ‘Look, you don’t want to end up like Emmett,’ ” Gant says.
The link between lynchings and the euphemized “capital punishment” was never abstract to Gant, and his attraction to the law was always tied to an interest in death penalty cases. More than half a century later, he represents capital defendants in a state that is executing prisoners at a historic rate.
Though Gant’s interest in the law was encouraged in his home, it faced racist roadblocks everywhere else. He never seriously considered attending the University of Missouri — the state’s major university accepted its first black undergrad in 1950; its law school didn’t integrate until the late 1960s. After a few years bouncing around smaller schools in the state pursuing a collegiate baseball career, he left Missouri in 1968 and went to Chicago with an uncle. From there, his career was fostered by a series of towering legal figures. Chicago civil rights attorney Thomas Todd helped Gant land a law school scholarship after a chance meeting in the courthouse during the trial of Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party. R. Eugene Pincham, another pillar of the black legal community at the time, gave Gant his first job out of law school and his first chance to handle some high-profile cases.
“He had this filing cabinet, and in that filing cabinet were all these cases that had been continued for years,” Gant says. “Most of the money had dried out. That was my cabinet.”
Among the cases Gant cut his teeth on was that of Linda Taylor, the Chicago woman who would famously become known as the “welfare queen.” Another file in that special cabinet? The one that led to the aforementioned contempt charge memorialized on Gant’s office wall.
Today, Gant — who will turn 73 this year — is on his second tour of duty in the Nashville-based federal public defender’s office. After a few years here in the early ’90s, he went to Cambodia to teach defense law (another experience documented on his office wall). After returning to the States, he did a stint working death penalty cases in Texas before spending a couple years working in New York. The current, relatively frenzied state of this line of work in Tennessee clearly troubles him. The way Gov. Bill Lee has signed off on the executions of men with remarkable redemption stories while speaking publicly of his own Christian faith is “appalling,” he says.
“But this is what I wanted to do,” Gant says. “I wanted to be in this.”
When he was “young and stupid,” Gant wanted to work on capital cases because they were the type of cases that made a lawyer’s name, he says. Not anymore.
“Took me about 10 years, and I can’t tell you how many clients, to realize it wasn’t about being in the big leagues — it was about preserving life.”
