
          In Memoriam: Philip G. Hammer (1915-2000)
          By Kytle, CalvinCalvin Kytle
          Vol. 22, No. 1, 2000,  p. 34
          
          Philip Gibbon Hammer, a pioneering urban planner and an
influential figure in the movement to end segregation in the South,
died January 21 in Edgewater, Maryland. He was 85.
          Philip Hammer served as an organizer and supervisor of the ad hoc
team that produced the research material from which Pulitzer-Prize
winning editor Harry Ashmore fashioned "The Negro and the Schools."
Published in 1954 one day before the U.S. Supreme_Court rendered the
Brown decision, the book gave Southern leaders
indispensable and immediate policy guides for desegregation of the
public_schools.
          In Atlanta during the fifties, Hammer served on the boards of the
exclusively-white Chamber of Commerce as well as interracial
organizations like the Urban League and the Southern Regional
Council.
          Phil Hammer belongs to a generation of Southern progressives who
fought for equality and justice at a time and place when for a white
person merely to shake hands with a black American was to rick social
ostracism and the loss of a job," said presidential adviser Vernon
Jordan Jr., a friend since their days together in Atlanta. "The civil
rights movement of the sixties owes more than historians can ever
document to the courage and political skills with which he and the
other members of this white minority attacked institutionalized race
prejudice after World_War_II."
          Hammer was born on September 18, 1914, in Philadelphia, but five
years later the family moved to Wilmington, North_Carolina. He went
to public_schools in Wilmington and grew up in a typical white middle
class Southern environment. He attributed his social awakening to his
experiences in the mid-thirties as a political science major at the
University of North_Carolina in Chapel_Hill, then under the gentle
presidency of Frank Porter Graham, an early civil_rights advocate.
          Hammer successfully pursued interwoven careers in business and
public service. He moved to Atlanta in 1947 and became chief staff
officer of a commission to study the extension of the city limits and
the merger of municipal and county facilities. He launched his own firm
in 1954 and became an urban adviser to successive, politically
disparate administrations in Norfolk, Savannah, Indianapolis,
Cincinnati, Washington, and St. Louis. In 1968 President Johnson
appointed him chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission, a
position he also held under President Nixon.
          To many of his friends, Phil Hammer's most significant work
occurred out of the spotlight, as a facilitator and quietly effective
mediator. In 1960 he introduced Harold Fleming, then executive
director of the Southern_Regional_Council, to a client,
philanthropist Stephen Currier. The result was the formation of
Washington's Potomac Institute, the first of whose many achievements
in race_relations was to develop the strategies that ended workplace
discrimination in defense industries during the Kennedy
administration.
          Phil Hammer is survived by his wife of 63 years, Jane Ross Hammer
of Edgewater, Maryland, three sons, and four grandchildren.
        
