Carol Weiss King FOIA Files
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Abstract
Carol Weiss King (1895-1952) was a prominent immigration attorney, civil rights activist, founding member of the National Lawyers Guild and author/editor of numerous legal publications. She was also the subject of FBI file 100-49864, the result of a ten-year surveillance. The collection contains portions of King's file in the form of a Vaughn Index generated by the FBI in compliance with the decision of the US Court of Appeals, DC Circuit, in the case Cynthia King v. United States Department of Justice (1987).
Historical/Biographical Note
Carol Weiss King (1895-1952) was a pioneer in the human rights legal arena. She graduated from Barnard College in 1916 and New York University Law School in 1920. Although she came from a family of corporate lawyers, she chose to focus primarily on immigration law and justice for resident aliens and newly arrived immigrants. She was also deeply interested in the problems of workers and consistently defended victims of anti-radical hysteria whose civil rights had been violated. She had a life-long association with left-wing activists, including members of the Communist Party of the United States. From 1924 to 1931 she edited the American Civil Liberty Union's Law and Freedom Bulletin and was a founder of both the International Judicial Association and the National Lawyers Guild. In 1942, she became general counsel to the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born.
Ms. King preferred researching complex legal issues and writing persuasive briefs to actual courtroom appearance; she worked behind the scenes on many prominent cases that came before the Supreme Court (e.g., Herndon v. Lowrey [1937]; Powell v. Alabama [1932], the first of the "Scottsboro Boys" cases; Schneiderman v. United States [1943] and others). She was also a successful courtroom advocate in such cases as the defense of Harry Bridges, radical president of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, against deportation proceedings.
Because of her association with controversial clients, King herself was subject to surveillance by the FBI.
In 1917, Carol Weiss married Gordon C. King, a Harvard graduate and struggling writer. They had one son, Jonathan, in 1925. Gordon King died in 1930. After a bout with cancer, Carol Weiss King died in 1952, at the age of 56.
Source: Ginger, Ann Fagan, Carol Weiss King, Human Rights Lawyer (Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, c1993).
Arrangement
Folders are arranged alphabetically within one series:
Missing Title
- Series I: Cynthia King v. U.S. Department of Justice Vaughn Index, 1941-1952, 1988.
Scope and Content Note
This collection is a Vaughn Index generated from the FBI file of Carol Weiss King as a result of the legal case, Cynthia King v. United States Department of Justice (US Court of Appeals, District of Columbia, 1984-1987). The case was brought by Cynthia King who was planning to write a book about the career of her mother-in-law, Carol Weiss King. Through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Ms. King sought access to Carol King's FBI file. The initial response provided 1,500 pages of the 1,665-page file, and from most of the 1,500 pages supplied, names and, frequently, substantial passages were redacted. The FBI contended that two exemptions made these deletions appropriate -- Exemption 1 and Exemption 7. The lower court agreed. The Court of Appeals, however, felt that additional justification would be required for those portions witheld based on Exemption 1 ("...to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy...") and, as a result, the FBI was compelled to create the Vaughn Index contained within this collection.
A Vaughn Index is a comprehensive listing of each witheld document cross-referenced with the FOIA exemption that the government asserts is applicable. The index includes a general description of each document sought, and explains the agency's justification for nondisclosure of each individual document or portion of a document.
Folders 1-3 contain a declaration by FBI Special Agent Susan Delia Pruet describing the process of developing the index and the narrative document itself. The remaining folders contain the pages in question with both FBI annotations and annotations made, presumably, by Cynthia King.
The rest of Carol King's FBI file -- those portions that were unchallenged -- is not contained within this collection but may be found in the Carol Weiss King Collection at the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute in Berkeley, California.
It should be noted that some portions of the index appear twice. In a number of instances, however, the annotations are different. Also, a significant portion of the file is a summary, created in 1951, of surveillance from 1941 through 1951.
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Conditions Governing Access
Materials are open without restrictions.
Conditions Governing Use
Because of the assembled nature of this collection, copyright status varies across the collection. Copyright is assumed to be held by the original creator of individual items in the collection; these items are expected to pass into the public domain 120 years after their creation. The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive is not authorized to grant permission to publish or reproduce materials from this collection.
Preferred Citation
Published citations should take the following form:
Identification of item, date; Collection name; Collection number; box number; folder number;
Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives
Elmer Holmes Bobst Library
70 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012, New York University Libraries.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Donated by Cynthia King in 2007. The accession number associated with this gift is 2007.016.
