While at Alabama, Vance was purportedly the head of a secret yet powerful inter-fraternity organization known as The Machine and was elected as President of the Student Government Association.
After law school, Vance entered military duty as an attorney in the United States Army Judge Advocate General Corps and was stationed at the Pentagon.
One of his first assignments was to serve on the team of lawyers defending the Army in hearings against charges brought by Senator Joseph McCarthy.
He then served a one-year stint as an attorney for the United States Labor Department before entering private practice in Birmingham from 1956 to 1977.
Vance also was the first notable Birmingham attorney to reject the unwritten "gentleman's agreement" by which all black members of a jury pool were eliminated from serving as jurors in civil cases.
The most well-known example of this fight came during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, as competing slates of delegates vied for credentials to be seated.
[1] On November 4, 1977, Vance was nominated by President Jimmy Carter to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit being vacated by Judge Walter Pettus Gewin.
After an intensive investigation, the federal government charged Walter Leroy Moody Jr. with the murders of Judge Vance and Robert E. Robinson, a black civil-rights attorney in Savannah, Georgia who had been killed in a separate explosion at his office.
Moody was also charged with mailing bombs that were defused at the Eleventh Circuit's headquarters in Atlanta and at the Jacksonville office of the NAACP.