Irving Feiner bought a new flat screen television to watch Barack Obama’s inauguration.

The day after the ceremonies, Feiner had a cerebral aneurysm. He never regained consciousness, and died two days later.

Flash back 60 years.

It’s March 8, 1949. The young Irving Feiner stands on the corner of South McBride and Harrison streets in downtown Syracuse. A crowd of about 80 people had gathered to hear a white Syracuse University student – who was also a World War II veteran – protest in favor of civil rights.

But when police officers became concerned about the crowd, they arrested Feiner for ‘inciting a breach of the peace.’ By the time the case reached the Supreme Court in 1951, a 6-3 decision upheld his arrest, claiming that Feiner’s First Amendment rights were not violated because police arrested him when they thought a riot might occur.

Feiner received a Western Union telegram from SU that he’d been ‘separated’ from the university, his daughter said. That meant expulsion, and that meant he’d lost his chance to attend law school. He’d been taking a physics class at night, so he could study at SU, despite not graduating high school before he enlisted and left to fight in France and Germany.

His older brother and sister begged the university to let him back in, but it wasn’t effective. His mother had a heart attack soon after.

‘He was never mainstream, my father,’ said Emily Feiner, his 48-year-old daughter. ‘That never deterred him from saying what he thought. He did not have this great need to have everybody accept him, but it was frustrating for him that people didn’t see the truth of what he said, often. And time and time again, people caught up to him. Years later, people would say, ‘You know what, Irving was right. Irving was right.”

SU caught up to Feiner on Oct. 13, 2006.

Barbara Fought, an SU professor for the past sixteen years, was opening the Tully Center for Free Speech in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. Fought was looking for a keynote speaker for the ceremony. She’d been teaching Feiner’s case in her communications law course every semester for 15 years.

Lynne Flocke, a newspaper professor in the Newhouse school, originally suggested the university invite Feiner. She wanted students to see free speech as more than a concept – as something that living, breathing people got in trouble for.

‘What he had gone through for free speech, I thought he’d be the perfect person for us to honor him,’ Flocke said. ‘Who else but Irving Feiner?’

Fought tracked down Feiner’s other daughter, though she presumed Mr. Feiner was no longer alive.

‘I e-mailed her in as tactful a way I could, and said, ‘I’ve taught this case forever, we’re starting this center, it’s a famous free speech case for Syracuse.’ And tried to say gently, ‘Whatever happened to Mr. Feiner?’ Without saying, ‘Is he dead or alive?”

Less than 45 minutes later, Fought had an e-mail in her inbox. The subject line: ‘You betcha I’m alive.’

‘Some people are kind of feisty and out there in their younger days, or their student days, and then they have families and kids and they get much more conservative and mainstream,’ Fought said. ‘And Irv stayed feisty, and a step off the mainstream, all his life.’

Fought said she always wonders what would have happened if the Supreme Court case was decided differently. Where would he be if he hadn’t left SU, or if he did go on to law school? But Fought said he wasn’t the person to live in what could have been.

When he returned for the opening of the Tully Center, the school was different. The city was different and the people were different, Fought said.

‘It was a chance for Syracuse University to mend the relationship with him,’ Fought said. ‘It was a chance for us to make some restitution to him, and I’m really pleased we were able to do that. And I think he felt duly honored.’

The man with the ‘spicy tongue and feisty spirit’ was pleased to see a place dedicated to teaching students about First Amendment rights, Fought said. He had sacrificed for that. And in Fought’s opinion, his case had been wrongly decided. Sixty years later, she thinks the outcome would have been different.

‘Irv would be urging people, particularly those who are the underdogs or have the minority opinion, to take a stand, to make their voice heard,’ Fought said. ‘I think Irv’s the guy who would be standing on the side of the crowd, egging the rest of us on, to take a stand for free speech.’

That’s what Emily Feiner said she learned from her father. He taught his two daughters to not be ashamed of his politics, or their own.

‘Here is a kid who grew up in Harlem, and went over to war and came back,’ Feiner said. ‘For a kid who grew up poor in New York, a Jewish kid in the ’20s, to come back and go to a school like Syracuse was pretty unusual then. This was not the regular course for kids in his neighborhood.’

She said her father enjoyed his time at SU, but was bitter when the university unceremoniously kicked him out and ‘squashed’ his law school dreams.

Years later, after Feiner had sent both of his daughters to college, SU allowed him to finish out his requirements and graduate.

And when he returned to have lunch with the chancellor on the day of the Tully Center’s opening, SU had finally caught up with its most famous free speech case.

Jeremy Blair, Feiner’s 11-year-old grandson, said he remembers how funny his grandfather was, and that he always took him to New York Yankees baseball games. Their favorite player was Mariano Rivera.

His five grandchildren wrote a tribute for his funeral service. In it, they called him, ‘the man who taught us all you need to change the world is a soapbox and a street corner.’

A few months ago, Emily Feiner spent election night with her father. He was thrilled to see a black president elected, she said.

‘I think he admired his tenacity and intelligence, and his ability to bring together lots of different people from different points of view, and get them to work with each other,’ she said.

At one point, he started to cry. His daughter looked at him and said, ‘Well Dad, a month in jail, years of being blacklisted, not getting to go to law school. I guess it was all worth it now, wasn’t it?’

A smile. A nod. And for the girl whose father had sacrificed his dreams for others’ freedom, that was enough.

shmelike@syr.edu

Published on February 2, 2009 at 12:00 pm