Iowa-raised lawyer laid groundwork for Redskins case

Stephen Baird’s boyhood visits to the Meskwaki Settlement in Tama certainly made a lasting impression and were saved by his parents on 8-millimeter film.

But the Iowa City native didn’t yet know how lasting his influence would be on how our culture labels Native Americans.

His work as a lawyer led to numerous schools changing team names that were viewed as disparaging. Those efforts laid the groundwork for the current trademark decision that ruled against the Washington Redskins name.

A series of events collided early in Baird’s legal career that were providential, he said, and have marked the 51-year-old’s career since.

As a University of Iowa law student, he began work on a law journal article on a relatively untested section of the trademark law. A trademark could not be immoral, deceptive or scandalous — those were frequently tested — but the last part was rarely decided in court. A trademark also may not “disparage or falsely suggest a connection with persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt or disrepute ... ”

He worked on the paper over the course of a year until he landed a job as a lawyer with Dorsey & Whitney in Minneapolis. While there the Atlanta Braves came to town to play the Minnesota Twins in the 1991 World Series. Protests on their mascot and name blew up in the media, just as they did a few months later when the Washington Redskins played in the 1992 Super Bowl there.

“I had been deaf to it. I had not even known it was of concern to the Native American population,” said Baird, still a Minneapolis lawyer. “The wheels started to turn. I started to wonder if there was an application for what I was working on.”

He set up a meeting with Suzan Harjo, president of the Morning Star Institute, a national native rights organization in Washington, D.C. She had worked on challenging names of public institutions with disparaging native monikers to some success.

“But talking to educators was very different than talking to pro football owners, who care about nothing but money,” Harjo said.

In walks Baird with a question: Have you ever thought about using the trademark office to challenge those team names?

“I have no idea what you are talking about,” Harjo told him.

“Then he explained to me and I was really intrigued. It made sense. His approach was a pocketbook incentive. It didn’t force anybody to do anything. It was about what the federal government would sanction. This case was about what the federal government will grant for the privilege of making money off racism.”

In 1992, Baird found clients interested in filing an action with the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, part of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

He researched the history of how the Washington Redskins name came about, introduced newspapers and movie clips showing the use of the word “Redskins” in disparaging ways and brought forth individuals who had negatively experienced the word.

“He was very focused and very precise but he also had a broad view of what kind of evidence would be needed,” Harjo said. “None of this gets done by one person. There was a team. But it was his vision and his theory that drove it. And he won. We won.”

The board ruled the name was disparaging in 1999. But a U.S. district judge and later a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Redskins in 2009, saying the plaintiffs should have brought their suit years before if the name offended them.

Two things had already happened during the course of the ligation. Every time news of the case surfaced in the media, it sparked negotiations at schools to change their names, and nearly 2,000 have changed theirs in the last generation, Harjo said.

It also compelled her to gather a new, younger group of plaintiffs to launch a similar challenge of the trademark, which the trademark board again ruled as disparaging and invalid Wednesday.

Baird was not part of the legal team and today works on intellectual property and trademark law at Winthrop & Weinstine in the Twin Cities.

Appeals are expected again. Some suggest it’s a formality, and that a court will rule in favor of the Redskins again.

Harjo and Baird aren’t so certain, partly because the plaintiffs are younger. To be sure, they will follow the blueprint laid out by Baird in more than 700 hours of work yearly for six years.

“It was exhilarating to have a legal theory and apparently be the first to think about it,” Baird said. “The whole point is you don’t ask the person speaking but the person identified in speech — you ask the Native Americans — if it is disparaging to them. You don’t have to be 100 percent in agreement. The legal test is if there is a substantial portion that find it offensive.”

The case, he muses now, has spanned his entire legal career. In that time, he’s had four children.

The only question left for him is what it will take for the Washington team to change its name.

“That, of course, is the ultimate goal,” he said.