Henry Washington Sawyer III was an American lawyer, civil rights activist and politician. He served in the U.S. Navy in World War II. He is best known for his advocacy of civil liberties, especially in First Amendment cases. He died of a heart attack at the age of 90.
About Henry W. Sawyer in brief
Henry Washington Sawyer III was an American lawyer, civil rights activist and politician. Born in Philadelphia, he served in the U.S. Navy in World War II, afterwards returning to the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He worked as a corporate lawyer but is best known for his advocacy of civil liberties, especially in First Amendment cases. A member of the Democratic Party, he pursued civil rights causes in Philadelphia and in the South during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. He also served a four-year term on the Philadelphia City Council, where he worked for civil service reform and to increase the amount of public art in the city. In Abington School District v. Schempp and Lemon v. Kurtzman, he successfully argued cases before the Supreme Court of the United States that became the basis for all modern Establishment Clause jurisprudence. He was married to Grace Scull until her death in 1999 and had three children together: two sons, Jonathan and Henry, and a daughter, Rebecca. He is survived by his wife, Grace, and his son, Jonathan Sawyer, who is now the mayor of Philadelphia. He died of a heart attack at the age of 90. He leaves behind a wife, Jonathan, and two daughters, Rebecca and Rebecca Sawyer, all of whom are now in their 80s and 90s, and their son Jonathan, who lives with his wife in New York City.
His son Jonathan Sawyer is the son of Henry Washington Sawyer II, who died in the 1918 flu pandemic two months before his son was born. Sawyer’s father was a Quaker, and he was raised by his mother, a school teacher, in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood. He served in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, but later said that he saw very little combat. In 1953, he was one of several volunteer defense attorneys in the case of United States v. Kuzma, a prosecution of Communist sympathizers under the Smith Act. The defendants were found guilty, but their convictions were reversed in 1957. Sawyer argued again in favor of someone accused of communist sympathies in Deutch v. United States. In an article written after Sawyer’s death, Judge Stewart Dalzell credited Sawyer’s skillful argument in persuading an appeals court to overturn the conviction and reverse the conviction on the grounds that the government failed to prove the charges against the defendant. In the article, he wrote that the court took the case to a higher court, which took the decision to uphold the conviction, and that he was surprised by the Court’s decision. In 1954, Sawyer was called back into the Navy in 1950 during the Korean War and later as a foreign service officer in Europe. He returned to Philadelphia in 1953.
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