[2] His grandfather, who knew many Civil War-era abolitionists (Frederick Douglass was a frequent guest in the Garrison home in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and Wendell Garrison knew him personally), regaled young Lloyd with many stories about the great struggles for civil rights and liberties of the 19th century.
[1] He attended Harvard College, but quit school in 1917 to enlist in the United States Navy after the U.S. entered World War I.
[1][6] He joined the National Urban League in 1924, after two African American men asked him to be treasurer of the nascent organization.
[3] He investigated "ambulance chasing" and bankruptcy fraud among the city's lawyers on behalf of the New York City Bar Association, and his work became so well known that in 1930 President Herbert Hoover appointed him special assistant to the U.S. Attorney General (where he served on a federal commission investigating bankruptcy fraud nationwide).
[8] As dean, Garrison led efforts to significantly revamp the curriculum, implementing a functionalist approach to the study of law, restructuring the first year to emphasize the origins and development of the American legal system, and creating a number of short courses in current law topics so that students would be prepared for the legal issues they encountered immediately upon graduation.
[11] Garrison, however, agreed to serve as the chair only to get the board up and running, and he resigned on October 2, 1934, to resume his position at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
[13] Roosevelt turned to Garrison again when he established a national mediation board in an (unsuccessful) attempt to quell the Little Steel Strike of 1937.
[14] Roosevelt later considered Garrison for the Supreme Court of the United States after Associate Justice Willis Van Devanter resigned on June 2, 1937.
[7][15] Although he primarily practiced corporate law for the rest of his life, Garrison continued to represent high-profile clients in a variety of cases.
[25][26] That same year, he hired Pauli Murray, one of the first female African American lawyers in the country, as an associate at his firm.
[6] From 1958 to 1961, Garrison worked closely with Eleanor Roosevelt, Thomas Finletter, and Herbert H. Lehman to break the power of Tammany Hall-backed politician Carmine DeSapio in New York City politics.
[32][33] Garrison was a long-time member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and served on its board of directors from the late 1930s until at least 1965.
[38] The 67-year-old Garrison was president of the Board of Education during a time of significant change for New York City public schools.
One locally controlled board in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood began violating the union's contract in order to bring in a new teaching staff.
In May 1963, the Consolidated Edison energy company proposed constructing a hydroelectric power generating station on top of Storm King Mountain, a famous Hudson River valley landmark.
[47] The Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference hired Garrison as its attorney, and he quickly filed suit in a federal court of appeals to stop the project.
[6] The New York City Bar Association established the Lloyd K. Garrison Student Leadership Program after his death.