From Civil Rights to Environmental Law: The Life of Martha McCabe

You can hear the moment Martha McCabe learned the world wasn’t fair, because she never stops seeing power clearly after that. Growing up in Albany, New York, she watches corruption operate in daylight and learns to track who gets protected, who gets harmed, and how authority covers for itself. That early education becomes the foundation for a legal career built around one question: when power is abused, what can you actually do about it?

Martha takes us from the early days of women entering law in larger numbers to the sharp end of civil rights litigation as a young lawyer in 1970s Texas. She talks about the culture of rural East Texas, the role of narrative and rhetoric, and the reality of taking cases that make people angry. One case still lands like a punch: a woman reports being raped in a county jail by a trustee with special privileges, and when Martha files a federal civil rights lawsuit over abusive conditions, the backlash escalates fast. Listening to her describe threats, retaliation, and the local politics around justice is a masterclass in how systems defend themselves.

Then the story pivots to environmental law and public health. After Love Canal, Martha joins the New York State Attorney General’s office and gets dropped into the “alphabet soup” of environmental regulation, eventually defending pesticide notification rules all the way to the Second Circuit. From there we connect the dots to today’s EPA rollbacks, corporate influence, Texas Gulf Coast sacrifice zones, and the high-stakes difference between the U.S. model of proving harm and Europe’s precautionary principle. We also talk about reinvention: getting fired, earning an MFA in creative writing, and deciding what legacy really means when progress comes in waves.

If you care about civil rights history, environmental justice, women in the law, and what it takes to keep showing up, subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway.

Transcript

Why Martha’s Story Matters

SPEAKER_01 0:10

There are women who choose to marry, stay home, and raise their children. Good, strong citizens shaping the world in so many wonderful ways. And there are women who enter professions, medicine, teaching, offering care, guidance, and knowledge. And then there are women who are called to something else entirely. Women who step forward to right wrongs, to stand in the face of injustice, to enter rooms where they were not expected, and sometimes not even welcomed. My guest today is one of those women, Martha McCabe. In the 1970s, she began her career as a civil rights lawyer in Texas. A challenging place to begin in a time when few women were invited to lead in the legal world, but Leachy did. Martha was one of the first large graduating classes of female lawyers, women who stepped into a profession that had long been closed to them and persistently began to change it from within. What she did is remarkable. What they did is remarkable. And it is my great pleasure to share her story with you today on this episode of Wise Woman's Stories. I'm your host, Delia Quigley. Let's

Growing Up Around Open Corruption

SPEAKER_01 1:36

begin at the beginning with Martha's early years. So welcome, Martha McCabe. Thank you so much for being on Wise Woman's Stories. I want to start with the question: can you take me back to the moment you first realized that the world wasn't as fair as you thought it was?

SPEAKER_00 1:58

Because I grew up in Albany, New York, and because anybody who was growing up and paying attention knew that corruption ruled the city, I can't remember a time in my life in single digits when I wasn't aware that things were not fair. I we you could drive around and see people double parking in retail uh stores, but triple parking outside the bookie joints. You could I got driven to school and I saw overfed red-faced Irish Albany police officers beating black men on the backs of police cruisers. It wasn't hard to find evidence of injustice. And you know, the the Irish ethos of having a really quick eye for injustice carried through, even though I was growing up in a relatively prosperous and affluent and and personally safe surrounding. There was a culture of understanding that power is abused. So I think I always knew that. So that guided your life. I would say that I have always, since a child, both inside the family and in the world, outside the family, look understood power relationships: the getting of power, the wielding of power, the losing of power, the struggle against power. That's just been a paradigm that I've understood since I was a young child.

Choosing Law Over Academia

SPEAKER_01 3:45

And you saw that one way to really work within the system and perhaps write some of those injustices was to become a lawyer.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

Yes, although my first career choice was to become a history professor and write books and spend my life in libraries, which was a very uh appealing uh prospect until I actually went to an Ivy League university uh in the history department, found there was only one woman in the history graduate program. She never looked happy. There were no women professors, and I thought, you know, note to self. This is not probably going to end well for me. And so I think I'll go up the road and apply to law school in Boston, which I did.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

But you did mention to me earlier that once you went to law school, I mean, it was a pretty big deal that there were so many women in your uh graduating class. You want to tell me

A Law School Built For Outsiders

SPEAKER_01 4:44

about that?

SPEAKER_00 4:44

Absolutely. It was interesting. The law school I attended, Northeastern University Law School in Boston, um, had been started in 1898 as a night law school by the YMCA for men who could not get into Harvard and Boston University because they were Jewish or black or Armenian or whatever. And so they went to Northeastern at night. In the 60s, the alums they hired the shrewd Irish professor of law to reopen the law school. He looked around and saw that the quickest way to get a high pass rate on the Massachusetts bar exam, which was relatively hard to pass, I think it was about 50% passed, was to bring in a lot of women who had really strong academic credentials. At that time, which was 1971, it is my understanding that both Harvard and Boston University had quotas for both women and Jewish applicants, 10% of each. And so he opened the gates and said, Y'all come on in. Two from Georgia, who had been part of the Great Migration, uh, one from Philadelphia. But she was an absolute bedrock pillar of our family and provided an incredible amount of stability in an otherwise not so stable situation. So I did have this abiding sense of gratitude. And with her, I watched the civil rights movement on television. And I remembered vividly, uh, I think we were watching George Wallace giving a speech, and she turned and said, he sure than liked the colored people, you know, and that went through me like a lance because of course I loved her very much, and and uh we all relied on her. And it was just such an honest statement of how things were in our country.

Civil Rights Calling In 1970s Texas

SPEAKER_01 7:30

So you took all of that, all that inspiration and the influence of these other women, and you headed to Texas to Manadochis, Macadotes, Macedoches, and you were a civil rights lawyer in the 70s in Texas.

Learning The South’s Storytelling Culture

SPEAKER_00 7:48

I was, and it was um instructive. And one of the things you think what but one of the things that made it not so so much of a cultural shift was that my parents had both grown up in New England in a in small towns in a day when things were much quieter and simpler in in many ways. And through them, I was used to the pace of country life and I liked it. And so moving to a rural area, the county I think had 30,000 population, that the county seat of Nacadoja is probably had 14 or 15,000. One of the things that I discovered was that although many of the women, um, both African American and white, were literate, most of the men who I dealt with were either not very literate or not at all literate because they were hired, quote, for their strong backs and their weak minds. And the women kept the accounts for the home and did the whatever interactions had to be done with the outside world in terms of finances. It was going back to a culture that was um preliterate in many respects, and I learned that the grandeur of narrative has been lost to the extent that we're all literate. People forget how to talk beautifully. We're we we in the north, in the Yankee culture, we talked to exchange information. In the south, I found a culture that people talked to exchange information about who they were, what their philosophy was, about, and people were judged on the quality of their rhetorical flourishes and not on the content, the technological or informational content of what they said. And I just loved that. I just couldn't get enough of it. You know, obviously, people who wanted to go be trial lawyers love to talk and love to listen to good people, people who are good talkers. And so to that extent, I fell into, you know, just a wonderful situation because I was surrounded constantly by people who had the art of the narrative well within their power to spin quite a story.

SPEAKER_01 10:14

Well, can you describe a, let's say, a case or an encounter that's never left you from that time?

A Jailhouse Assault Case Backfires

SPEAKER_01 10:20

Because you were um trying different cases at the time, correct?

SPEAKER_00 10:27

So, I mean, getting death threats is never pleasant, but I went and talked to the wonderful woman who was the wife of the president of the ACP, and she said, Well, what we found over the years is if they're talking, they're not shooting. I said, Oh, okay, I'll bear that in mind. So I went home, somewhat, you know, mollified. Also, I'm white and I'm a lawyer, and I did think that that was probably those two qualities were um not guarantees of safety, but they certainly were uh put me higher lower on the risk scale. But to your question specifically, yes, there was a case that I in which my inexperience exceeded my good sense to take in the first place, but I did for a woman who said she had been raped in the county jail by a trustee, which was uh an inmate who was given special privileges by the sheriff to come and go from the jail, mostly to go out and work for the sheriff and other members of the county government, uh, probably for free or not, not much, and then come back and sleep in the jail at night. This woman, who was a white woman who was living with an African-American man out in the country, said that he, while she was picked up for public intoxication, the trustee had raped her, and we filed a federal civil rights suit alleging abusive conditions in the jail, which had no provision for women prisoners at all. I mean, uh it was very old-timey. It was probably the least apt lawsuit I ever filed in federal court, but other people certainly do worse things, and that was one of my freshman mistakes. She deserved to have her theory tested that she was indeed raped in the county jail by somebody who had authority given to him by the sheriff. The um sheriff and the chief of police sued me and the president of the NAACP for getting together for conspiring to have this woman uh encourage this woman to file the lawsuit. What happened was remarkable, and it was a salient turning point in the county, in the life of that county. What happened was the president of the NAACP was really um an even-handed man when it came to helping his community. The sheriff and the chief of police sued us in federal court, in state court, pardon me, in Nackydoches County for umpteen hundreds of thousands of dollars for ruining their reputation. In my response to the lawsuit, I couldn't have libeled them, I couldn't have slandered them because their reputations weren't worth a darn to begin with.

SPEAKER_01 13:18

Here you were in Texas for 11 years trying civil rights cases, working for the NACP. And then boom, so 11 years, so now you're in your 30s, right?

Switching To Environmental Law In Albany

SPEAKER_01 13:30

And you shift, I mean, that's a dramatic shift coming north to Albany to work for the attorney general. What was the big difference that you noticed? What was the shift you had to make?

SPEAKER_00 13:42

They told me, well, you know how to try cases in federal court. We need that. We don't have a lot of that on our staff, and we'll teach you the environmental law. So come on. And so I did. And I moved up there because my father had died suddenly and left my mother up in years and in poor health with my sister to take care of her. And I thought I should bear that, help her bear that responsibility. And so it was appealing to me to learn a whole new area of law. And I mean, I spent my first six months in alphabet soup of all the environmental law abbreviations, feeling as though I had dropped into, I don't know, some language that I certainly didn't understand.

SPEAKER_01 14:27

Okay, but let me ask you about that, because so there you're learning environmental law. Were you shocked by how many laws were being broken environmentally?

SPEAKER_00 14:37

No, because I grew up in Albany and corruption was the way of the world. Um it this was this was after Love Canal, if you remember Love Canal, where a group of women in the neighborhood around Love Canal, which was uh inactive hazardous waste dump site, um uh organized around cancer clusters and other illnesses that were manifesting that they thought were probably uh could either cause or contributed to by people's exposure, their neighbors' exposure to hazardous waste that had been abandoned in drums that were leaking um outside Buffalo, New York, and an old Rust Belt community Rust Belt community with a lot of the leftovers of the Industrial Revolution and chemical manufacturing establishments that had either moved away or gone belly up and had left their detritus behind that happened to be very poisonous. We were beginning as a country to be aware that uh, yeah, the industrial revolution and chemical manufacturing made people very prosperous, but they they didn't clean up after themselves. And so there was an effort at that point in the 80s to clean up some of what had been left behind. Corporations tried to privatize their gains and socialize their costs because that's what was going on. They were pushing the costs of waste disposal off on the body politic while they ran off with the profits. So were you trying these corporations? Were you bringing them to court? Well, the process in the state government was much different than being in private practice. They because because Abrams govern uh Gemmo Abrams was an elected official and they settled most cases. They didn't try they didn't try many. I can't remember one. I certainly didn't try. I did have a case against uh I was defending the state because the state had passed some regulations that required notice to be given to the public when pesticides were used in in areas that the public could access. And the uh pesticide manufacturers association, chemical manufacturers, sued the state to enjoin those regulations, and I got to defend the state uh regulations, which was very interesting. And I I worked very hard on it, and and eventually the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, the Federal Appellate Court in New York, um upheld the regulations.

Regulation Rollbacks And Corporate Power

SPEAKER_01 17:29

So, what does that do to you today, watching as the EPA, you know, gets rid of the regulations and the laws that have been placed to that we've worked so hard, and you probably worked hard to regulate these chemical companies?

SPEAKER_00 17:45

Well, it's all perfectly in character. Um the you know, they the corporations have have bought and paid for the government and that they wanted, and the government is doing what they wanted. Um it's a it's a transaction, and uh they wanted to be, quote, relieved from all the quote burdensome regulations that, you know, frankly, are pretty lightweight by comparison with perhaps what I think might should be in place. It's a push-pull that's been going on at least since the early 20th century, um, in terms of corporate entities trying to evade regulation and taxation.

Texas Policy And The Sacrifice Zone

SPEAKER_01 18:40

All right, so you're there for five years in Albany, and then you decide to go back to Texas, this time to Austin. What made you just make that decision?

SPEAKER_00 18:50

Well, my mother died, and I didn't have any reason to stay there, and I had discovered that I liked being closer to the equator, and that I did not have any use for snow anymore, and shoveling snow. So um it was time to head back to Texas, but I wanted to be in Austin, um, and I went there and found a job shortly after I got there. Ann Richards was elected governor in 1990, and her running mate, Bob Bullock, had been the comptroller of public accounts for many years, and he ran for lieutenant governor. And um, the woman who was supposed to be doing Governor Richards, I mean, uh Governor Bullock's environmental policy work, uh, got hired and then immediately told him she was going off to work for Ann Richards. And so I happened to have a friend who was one of the few people who had heard that news, and he said, you've got to apply for that right now. So I did, and I got the job.

SPEAKER_01 19:58

So you went from being a civil rights lawyer in Texas to a you were assistant attorney general, right? In New York State, and you were working on environmental law. So you come to Austin, Texas, and now are you still working in environmental law? Very different though, New York State and Texas environmental law.

SPEAKER_00 20:21

Well, but the it was it was really wide open because Governor Richards and the lieutenant governor to some extent had campaigned on greater regulation and more concern for the public health of communities that were impacted. Because, you know, you've heard the term sacrifice zone. Much of, especially the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana and Mississippi, has been a sacrifice zone that the population who lives there and works there has had to bear a disproportionate share of disease and death related to their exposure to chemicals in on the Gulf Coast. The Gulf Coast chemical industry was really uh ramped up as a response to our uh preparation for World War II. And some of the world's largest chemical manufacturing refineries are on the Gulf Coast of Texas.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

And um excuse me, isn't there like a law is called what something assessment where they allow so many people, they know and allow so many people are gonna get sick and die to balance out having these chemicals or this way of life?

SPEAKER_00 21:38

That is a uh that has been a hotly contested issue. Uh of course, Europe has the precautionary, most European countries and the EU, I think, operate on what's called the precautionary principle, which uh require chemical manufacturers to prove that they're what they are doing is safe for the public. We operate On the opposite principle, which is it's up to the government, which is rarely almost never well resourced enough to prove that this is going to kill you. So it's uh yes, you're you're right. And it's a the framework is probably misguided to begin with, and then it's applied in a very skewed manner.

SPEAKER_01 22:25

So what do you feel, or when you look back at it, what do you feel that that time and your efforts, what how did that contribute to Texas, to the well-being of other people's lives, to the environment?

SPEAKER_00 22:41

Well, we to a great extent, all humans have to reckon with the fact that we write in sand and whatever we do is washed away by the next wave. And that's of course what's happening now in Texas. The tide switched from being environmentally regulatory and health protective to being a corporate field day. Whatever they want to do, they can do. Um, I think it's inevitable if our electoral system holds up under the pressure it's under currently, that a reaction will occur and people will say, no, the heck with you and the horse you rode in on. We want people to protect us. We want to be, have some assurance that our drinking water is is reasonably safe and that our air is reasonably clear. So I think it's uh a push and pull. I think it's we go in waves in these things.

Getting Fired And Becoming A Writer

SPEAKER_01 23:51

All right, so you leave Austin, but you go back to school to become a writer.

SPEAKER_00 23:59

Yes, yes. I I I owe that to the fact that I got fired. So it's one of those lessons that while it's painful to be relieved of your job, um, I was certainly aware that several men wanted my job. And not not working for lieutenant governor, I had another job. And uh I was general counsel of a large state agency. And um uh I was I think it's certainly clear that I underestimated the extent to which they wanted my job, and they got it. Uh, but although it was really unpleasant, it opened the door for me to go back to graduate school and get my MFA in creative writing and fiction and write a novel. So I can't say that it was all beer and skittles or that it was easy, but it was um quite wonderful to spend three years uh reading novels and poetry and thinking about you know the great themes of literature and learning how to be a semi-capable fiction writer at this point in your life today.

Legacy, Limits, And Advice For Women

SPEAKER_01 25:12

So you're today you're 78 and you're you know looking back at the this young woman or this woman who came through a tremendous amount as a lawyer and the people she met and the and the justices and uh injustices and you know trying to right so many wrongs, um, that we made any progress?

SPEAKER_00 25:36

Well, there are two different strands here. I asked myself, was I of service? I think that's the the mindset I started with. I I, you know, I wasn't, I knew I was never going to be the great uh courtroom master of the courtroom, but I could be of service to people, uh, as we thought of it in our law firm in East Texas, opening the door to people who for people to get into the courthouse who could never bring a case before because the legal services program really hadn't existed there. So was I of service? I think the answer is yes. Did I make lasting changes? No, I think I was part of a group of people, both mostly African-American with some white allies, who pushed the rock uphill of oppression and injustice, and open spaces for people to have more possibilities, to have more choices, and to live more economically stable lives.

SPEAKER_01 26:42

Let's take a look at what you would say to young women, a lot of young women now entering your professional field, becoming lawyers, all kinds of lawyers. It's it's just a given now, right? What would you say to them starting out?

SPEAKER_00 26:58

Well, I don't think there's a homogeneous group of women with the same values anymore. I think in in my when I was young, you all you pretty much almost had to be a feminist to be a lawyer. Now it's not true. It's much easier, and you don't have to already have sharp edges. You can just kind of mosey on in there and just be regular. I I know I could never do that. That was not available to me as a young lawyer because I was a first. That's just what happens when you're first.

SPEAKER_01 27:33

What you just said is that you had been of service, and that was of interest to you to be of service. But at the same time, what you're also saying is that you were a pioneer for women. You were the first in many, many respects. You were the only woman in the room with 40 men to pass, you know, to get a bill across. You were trying cases as a young woman that nobody else was doing, or could probably touch. That seems to be, I don't know, a stronger legacy.

SPEAKER_00 28:06

Yeah, that's what we wanted to do. That's why we went to law school. And we were getting to do what we wanted to do. And so there was a lot of positive energy and uplift in getting to do what one wants and having the professional life that one has set forth to have. Yeah, there was a lot of there were a lot of hard things. And uh, you know, there were judges who were just absolute beasts about being a woman in the courtroom, no question, and said just outlandish things, just outlandish things. But as for me giving younger women advice, I went to law school over 50 years ago, so I don't know what the heck's going on now. It's a very different world. It's a very different world. And also I had the luxury of being able to go into my own practice right out of school because I wasn't burdened with debt. And that made a huge difference.

Closing Thoughts And Where To Find Delia

SPEAKER_01 29:02

You've been listening to my interview with Martha McCabe, a woman who answered the call to serve, first in the civil rights movement of 1970s, Texas, and later shaping environmental law from New York to Texas, always guided by a deep commitment to justice and the well-being of others. Hers was a life lived with purpose, persistence, and strength. This is Wise Woman's Stories. I'm your host, Delia Quigley. You can find more of my work at DeliaQuigley.com. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time,