Morris B. Abram served as Chairman of the Conference of Presidents from July 1986 through December 1988.

Mr. Abram fought passionately for Human and Civil rights at home and abroad. Originally from Georgia, he received his law degree from the University of Chicago and attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. For one summer he joined the staff of US Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, the American Chief Prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which influenced his fight for human rights as well as his involvement in communal Jewish affairs.

He first practiced law in Georgia and was involved in a fourteen-year long legal battle to overturn a Georgia electoral rule that disenfranchised black voters and perpetuated segregation in the state. Abram argued that the law was unconstitutional as it violated the principal of “one man, one vote.” The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled in favor of Abram’s client, establishing the constitutional principal of “one person, one vote.”

Mr. Abram was appointed to national service by five American presidents in fields as diverse as civil rights, international human rights, the ethical problems of medicine, and the war on poverty. President John F. Kennedy appointed him first general counsel of the Peace Corps, and President Lyndon B. Johnson selected him as US representative to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (among others). He served on President Carter’s Commission on the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research; later, Ronald Reagan nominated him for the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

President George H.W. Bush appointed Mr. Abram US Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva. After his tenure ended in 1993, he co-founded, with Edgar Bronfman and the World Jewish Congress, United Nations Watch, for which he served as chairman.

Mr. Abram served as national president of the American Jewish Committee, president of Brandeis University, and for nine years was chairman of the United Negro College Fund. He was also the chairman of the National Conference of Soviet Jewry, advocating for the right of Jews in the Soviet Union to emigrate to the United States and Israel. Mr. Abram was also a partner at the New York law firm of Paul, Weiss.

Morris B. Abram passed away in 2000.