The collection is in six series:
Obituaries, containing newspaper reports of the death of King in 1952, her brother William in 1946, and her son Jonathan in 1997.
Correspondence, containing photocopies of letters from King concerning the deportation case of Harry Bridges, President of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union. The series also contains the correspondence of Ann Fagan Ginger in her efforts to interview those who had connections with Carol Weiss King during her lifetime.
FBI Dossier, a photocopy of most of the 1600 pages generated in the investigation of Carol Weiss King and her associates. The researcher will find many pages with redacted (censored) portions. These passages will have a handwritten notation listing the exception to release of this information under the Freedom of Information Act. In the King file, most are noted "b1" which is the exception due to national security. "7d" is another common exception in the file, meaning the information was supplied by a confidential source. There are also pages noted "previously upheld", meaning that the redacted sections had been challenged and that the Department of Justice appeals process affirmed that the redaction was valid. This series contains 12 folders with consecutively numbered pages, and seven folders with unnumbered pages. Folder 17 contains correspondence related to the FOIA request and the Court of Appeals case filed by Cynthia King.
Source Notes, containing lists of sources used by Ann Fagan Ginger in writing the biography, photocopies of pages from standard reference sources summarizing the lives of many persons featured in the book, and handwritten note cards with references to historical sources.
Printed Materials, booklets, pamphlets and photocopies of early publications of the International Labor Defense, with which Carol Weiss King was associated early in her career, as well as copies of articles used for background and color in the biography.
Book Drafts, early and late typewritten drafts of chapters of the King biography.
Carol Weiss King was born in New York City in 1895. Her father was a corporate lawyer who died when she was 15, the youngest of four children. Carol Weiss went to private schools and Barnard College, then to law school at New York University in 1917, one of the few law schools accepting women at that time. Weiss also married a young writer, Gordon King, as she entered law school. Although her politics and social interests differed greatly from his, they were happily married until he died of a brief illness in 1930. She never remarried. When King began law practice in 1920, intending to practice labor law, she rented office space from the firm of Hale, Nelles and Shorr. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was conducting the "Palmer Raids" on foreign-born workers, and the Hale firm was involved in defending the workers from deportation. She began to assist with those cases, and within a few years, King was one of the best attorneys in the field of immigration law. Over the years, she handled hundreds of cases, large and small. She was general counsel of the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born and defended many accused Communists from automatic deportation. King was instrumental in changing the McCarran Immigration Act to require due process and a hearing for aliens threatened with removal. She was involved in the cases of Harry Bridges and William Schneiderman, both U.S. Supreme Court landmark decisions. She also worked on the Scottsboro case in Alabama. For 32 years, she was an untiring advocate for human rights. After a trip to the Soviet Union in 1932, King founded a human rights journal, the International Juridical Association Bulletin. The IJA Bulletin was published for ten years, and was widely respected for its reports on the practice of immigration, civil rights, and labor law. Beginning sometime in the 1940s, the FBI began to keep a detailed dossier on Carol Weiss King. Although she was always too independent to join any political party, many of her close associates and clients were affiliated with the Communist Party. The file numbered more than 1600 pages over a twelve year period. Only at her death (of cancer at the age of 56) was she removed from J. Edgar Hoover's list of citizens subject to immediate arrest in the event of an attack on U.S. soil. By all contemporary accounts, Carol Weiss King was a brilliant lawyer with a warm, outgoing personality. Her friend and daughter-in-law, Cynthia King, brought suit against the Department of Justice over their reluctance in the 1980s to release redacted (censored) pages from the FBI dossier. The case went to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, where in 1987, the court ordered the FBI to examine the entire file again in light of the fact that national security was unlikely to be at issue after 40 years. However, the court did uphold the Freedom of Information/Privacy Act exception to releasing names of FBI informants, even if deceased. Carol and Gordon King had one son, Jonathan, who became a well known architect and professor of architecture at the University of Michigan for several years, as well as at other universities. He died in 1997.