Wiley Austin Branton; Counsel for Desegregating Black Youths

Civil rights attorney Wiley Austin Branton, the primary counselor to the nine black students who desegregated Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957, has died of a heart attack. He was 65.

Branton died Thursday at his home in Washington.

The New York Times quoted Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall as saying, “He devoted his entire life to fighting for his own people.”

Marshall and Branton had been attorneys for the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

A native of Pine Bluff, Ark., Branton was among the first black graduates of the University of Arkansas School of Law. He was chief local counsel for the nine blacks who entered Central High School. It was the first time federal troops were used to enforce desegregation orders.

Largely because of his prominence in that effort he became the first director of the Atlanta-based Voter Education Project in 1962 at the request of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The project signed up blacks to vote across the South.

In 1965, he became a special assistant to Atty. Gen. Nicholas B. de Katzenbach, a post he retained under De Katzenbach’s successor, Ramsey Clark. He became executive director of the United Planning Organization, Washington’s anti-poverty agency, two years later.

Branton was named the eighth dean of Howard University Law School in 1977 and was credited with strengthening standards and improving instruction. He returned to private practice in 1983, becoming a partner in the Washington office of Sidley & Austin, a Chicago-based firm.

Branton at one time was convicted of a misdemeanor for teaching the mechanics of voting to blacks. In the 1960s, he represented freedom riders in Mississippi and blacks involved in voter registration drives. At the time of his death, Branton was a member of the board of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund.