African-American civil rights In April 1947, Lynn participated in the
Journey of Reconciliation, a challenge to
Jim Crow laws that later came to be considered the first "freedom ride" of the American civil rights movement; it was a forerunner to the
Freedom Rides of the early 1960s. Sixteen civil rights activists, eight of them
black and eight of them
white, boarded
Greyhound and
Trailways buses and traveled through Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee to bring public attention to the reality of racial segregation and dramatize the
South widespread disregard of the 1946
U.S. Supreme Court decision
Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia. This held that the U.S. Constitution barred racial segregation in
interstate transportation. Lynn was the first of the group to be arrested, for sitting in the white section of a Trailways bus departing from
Richmond, Virginia. Lynn told the bus driver that the Supreme Court had ruled against segregation on interstate buses, but the driver responded that his employer was Trailways, not the Supreme Court, and he was following Trailways rules. After being released on
bail in Richmond, Lynn traveled to
Raleigh, North Carolina, where he joined his colleagues on the bus and completed the journey. The
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) could not enlist any of its attorneys to represent the boys and referred the case to Lynn. After learning that the boys had already been convicted and sentenced by a county
juvenile court judge without having either legal counsel or an opportunity to confront their accusers, as required by the
Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, Lynn appealed the conviction, but without result. He then contacted former First Lady
Eleanor Roosevelt for assistance; she urged President
Dwight Eisenhower to intervene in the situation. The "Kissing Case" was Lynn's first collaboration with North Carolina civil rights activist
Robert F. Williams. In 1959, Lynn protested Williams' suspension from the NAACP, and urged the organization to adopt a more "militant program". Lynn later represented Williams as his lawyer during the 1960s, when Williams, who had become increasingly militant, exiled himself in Cuba, China, and Tanzania to escape prosecution in the United States for a charge of
kidnapping. Lynn visited Williams in Cuba. In the mid-1960s, Lynn teamed with attorney
William Kunstler to represent the
Harlem Six (six black teenagers) in appealing their murder conviction for robbing a secondhand store and killing one of the store's proprietors. The two attorneys believed that the teenagers had been
framed. In the appeal filed in 1965, Lynn and Kunstler asked for the convictions to be overturned on the grounds that the Six had not had competent legal counsel for their trial. The convictions were reversed for a different reason – that some trial evidence had been inappropriately admitted. Retrials were ordered, beginning in November 1970, when two of the Six were retried. Lynn and Kunstler revealed their discovery that two prosecution witnesses had committed
perjury in the first trial. After the trial concluded, the jury reported that it could not reach a verdict, so the trial was declared a
mistrial. After another trial was held, again ending in a mistrial, the defendants were allowed to
plead guilty to
manslaughter in exchange for their immediate release from confinement. Conrad Lynn's decision to handle his brother's case was contrary to the advice of civil rights organizations such as the NAACP, which considered support of the U.S. war effort to be in the best interest of African Americans. Looking back on the case in 1973, Conrad Lynn told a reporter that the legal battle had served "to make the public — particularly the white majority — aware that black people resented segregation as a mark of inferiority" and had helped bring an end to segregation in the Army in 1948 under President
Harry S. Truman.
Puerto Rican nationalism Lynn was a long-time supporter of the
nationalists who sought to gain independence for
Puerto Rico. He also represented
Lolita Lebrón, one of five Puerto Rican nationalists who carried out an
attack on the United States House of Representatives in 1954 to publicize the nationalist movement. He argued that the attack was an act of protest that was justified by "the illegality of the occupation of Puerto Rico by the United States."
HUAC Lynn was interrogated by the
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1963. He speculated that the committee's calling him reflected an effort by them "to frighten integrationists who are more radical than Martin Luther King."
Campaign for judgeship In 1972 Lynn sought election to a judgeship on the
New York State Court of Appeals, asserting that there should be a black man on the court, "since 90 percent of all those awaiting trial in state prisons are either black or Puerto Rican." ==Final years==