Truman K. Gibson Jr., an attorney who played a major role in ending segregation in the Armed Forces and was once one of the most powerful boxing promoters in the nation, died Friday, Dec. 23, in Mercy Hospital in Chicago.
Mr. Gibson, 93, navigated a highly segregated American mainstream to become an influential architect of two profound albeit disparate changes in national culture: early efforts at integration and the introduction of boxing to the fledgling TV industry.
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Along the way he shared history with luminaries ranging from Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall to author Ralph Ellison to President Harry Truman, who referred to Mr. Gibson as “my namesake.”
“He lived a great life, and he lived it on his own terms,” said his daughter, Karen Kelley.
Mr. Gibson may have stood outside the spotlight among his celebrity friends, but unlike the oft-exploited hero of Ellison’s novel “Invisible Man,” he was a highly visible African-American in the mid-20th Century.
His career path across a broad spectrum including law, boxing, literature, politics and show business was propelled by meeting the young fighter Joe Louis shortly after Mr. Gibson got his law degree from the University of Chicago in 1935.
Louis went on to become heavyweight champion.
“Truman Gibson was a seminal figure in boxing in the 1950s,” boxing historian Bert Sugar said. “He was a founding father of the International Boxing Club and one of the most important people there. As such, he has long been looked at as the last link to an era that included the advent of boxing as a staple on TV.”
Legendary boxing trainer Angelo Dundee recalled Mr. Gibson as “a class guy” and credits him with saving the eyesight of welterweight and middleweight champion Carmen Basilio after a grueling loss to Sugar Ray Robinson at the Chicago Stadium in 1958.
“I called Truman at 4 in the morning and he got us an eye doctor and into the hospital,” Dundee recalled.
Before he became Louis’ advocate in his quagmire of income tax troubles, Mr. Gibson represented the boxer during his stint as an Army enlisted man in the early 1940s.
“Louis didn’t want to box in Army camps because the stands were segregated,” Sugar said. “Gibson negotiated and got integration of the audience before Louis boxed.”
Mr. Gibson was named a civilian aide to the War Department in 1940 and appointed six years later to Truman’s Advisory Committee on Universal Military Training. That committee influenced Truman’s landmark 1948 decision to desegregate the military.
Mr. Gibson received the Presidential Medal of Merit in 1947 for his service as a member of Truman’s “black cabinet,” becoming the first African-American to be so honored.
Born in Atlanta in 1912, Mr. Gibson moved north with his family in the early 1920s. After growing up in Columbus, Ohio, where his father was an insurance executive and Truman was an honor student and high school football player, he came to Chicago to further his education.
At the U. of C. Mr. Gibson worked for political scientist Harold Gosnell as a research assistant for what became “Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago.”
Mr. Gibson met his wife of 62 years, the former Isabelle Carson, in 1937 when she came to his law office seeking representation after being denied service at a Greek restaurant. He won her $25 in damages, and the two were married in 1939.
Mr. Gibson was also a member of the legal team that won a U.S. Supreme Court victory in 1940 against the use of restrictive real estate covenants that kept blacks out of white neighborhoods. Lee vs. Hansberry, in which the team represented real estate broker Carl Hansberry, served as inspiration for the play “A Raisin in the Sun,” written by his daughter, Lorraine.
In World War II, Mr. Gibson and Louis worked with then-Army Col. Frank Capra to make “The Negro Soldier” a documentary chronicling black soldiers’ war experience.
After the war, Louis returned to boxing and brought Mr. Gibson into the International Boxing Club and a multimillion-dollar business that thrived with twice-weekly network boxing telecasts. In partnership with James Norris and Arthur Wirtz, Mr. Gibson became boxing’s first black promoter.
The IBC controlled the sport until 1957, when a federal court ruled the organization was a monopoly that violated antitrust laws.
Intimations of organized crime involvement in boxing abounded during Mr. Gibson’s tenure with the IBC. In an interview with the Tribune two years ago, Mr. Gibson admitted he knew mobster Frank Carbo but insisted that no fights were fixed.
He repeated those assertions in his 2005 memoir, “Knocking Down Barriers: My Fight for Black America.”
In 1961, Mr. Gibson was convicted, along with four others, on charges of extortion involving an attempt to take a share of the earnings of onetime welterweight champion Don Jordan. He received a 5-year suspended sentence and a $5,000 fine.
Mr. Gibson went into private practice on the South Side in 1963, but legal woes followed, ranging from bank fraud convictions to a court order to make restitution in a vacation swindle. In all, he received probation and had his law license suspended for 2 years.
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Even into his 90s, practiced law at his office in Bronzeville.
In addition to his daughter, Mr. Gibson is survived by granddaughters, Jessica Kelley and Cira Kelley, great-granddaughters Cherlonda and Blossom Kelley; a great-grandson Joshua Kelley; and a great-great-grandson, Sky Greely.
Services are pending.