Two distinguished attorneys with personal experience in the sting of poverty and social exclusion have conspired to lessen such obstacles to legal careers for poor, working-class undergraduates at the City College of New York.

Last week, Joseph H. Flom, one of New York's premier philanthropists and the sole surviving name partner of his global law firm, announced a grant of $9.6 million over the next decade to create the Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom Honors Program in Legal Studies at City College of New York.

From 1939 to 1941, Mr. Flom was himself a cash-strapped night student at City College who sometimes slept in class, exhausted after working by day as an "office boy" at a small Jewish law firm, in keeping with job titles and segregation of the day.

Accepting the Skadden gift was City College President Gregory H. Williams, who arrived at the Harlem campus in 2001 after a deanship at the Ohio State University College of Law, and whose trials and deprivations were recounted in a 1995 autobiography, "Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black."

That these men of different places, races and generations are linked to what they believe is an unprecedented academic initiative is unsurprising to each.

"Once I started talking to Joe and learned about his background, and once he learned about mine, we knew where each one of us was coming from," said Mr. Williams. "We both knew what it meant to get an education, and how difficult that can be when you come from a family with no resources."

The Brooklyn-bred Mr. Flom is 84. Mr. Williams, 63, was born in Virginia to a white mother and a father who "passed," as light-skinned blacks in the 1940s and '50s expressed it.

In his book, Mr. Williams tells of believing he was an ordinary towheaded white lad until age 12, when his father confessed his racial deception in the mid-1950s after his failing business necessitated moving to Muncie to live with black relatives at a time when the southern Indiana city was the epicenter of the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1999, during Mr. Williams' tenure as president of the Association of American Law Schools and two years before taking over at City College, he was summoned to the White House when President Bill Clinton issued a "Call to Action," by which he pressed law firms to hire and promote more minority attorneys.

Mr. Williams began thinking about how he might answer the president's call, eventually concluding that he could be more effective birthing a program at some point before law school rather than during - and at an institution such as City College, which since 1847 has educated students who found entry into the professions difficult due to their race, ethnicity or religion.

"I'd heard that Joe Flom was a real hard-core guy," said Mr. Williams, who put the noted philanthropist on his call list when he landed in New York City. "But when I heard he was an alumnus, I contacted him as soon as I could. I found him incredibly approachable. I said to him, 'Joe, we're trying to have a renaissance and I need your support. He said, 'Tell me what I need to do.' We pretty much became partners at that point."

He added, "I certainly didn't have to explain to Joe Flom what this opportunity could mean."

The honors program at the Harlem campus, where 85 percent of the 14,500 students are ethnic minorities, is a means of building a pipeline of 50 students a year through mentoring and special prelaw course work - students who will go on to law schools and eventually corporate law firms, where they would help to literally change the face of a profession with a "persistent lack of diversity," according to a news release accompanying Mr. Flom's grant announcement.

On the poverty law front, Skadden has for the past 20 years provided public interest agencies with graduates of the nation's top tier law schools working two-year projects through the Skadden Fellowship Foundation. To date, the foundation has supported more than 530 fellows at a cost of about $2 million annually. The fellowship program was recently renewed for another five years.

During an interview this week in his spacious but spartan Times Square office, furnished with a nondescript desk and a pair of butterscotch leather sofas scuffed at the edges, the characteristically terse Mr. Flom shrugged off the notion of giving away huge sums of money over several decades.

"If you're lucky," he said, "that's what you have to do."

Up From Poverty

Earlier in life, Mr. Flom's circumstances were not so fortunate.

His mother "kept us alive," he said, by embroidering appliqués at home. His father found work "wherever he could, but nothing stuck."

When the stock market crashed in 1929, launching the Great Depression, the Flom family took frequent advantage of offers extended to struggling tenants by struggling landlords.

"They used to give concessions, where you got the first three months for free," Mr. Flom recollected. "When the three months were up, we'd move. We lived in a lot of places."

In the years leading up to America's entry into World War II, "I was living in the ass end of Brooklyn, taking the subway at the Coney Island station into Midtown to work every day," said Mr. Flom. "Then the subway up to 140th Street to night school, after which I had an hour's ride back to Brooklyn."

Hunger, he said, is what kept him going. Then, looking out a corner window somewhere into the far distance, 41 floors over the city, Mr. Flom added, "When you don't have enough to eat . . . You never forget that."

Between exhaustion and the war's onset, Mr. Flom never completed his course work at City College, though he did earn a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1948 due to a burst of postwar patriotism whereby elite graduate schools waived the bachelor's degree requirement in the case of certain veterans.

Mr. Flom remained stateside during the war years.

"The Army sent me to a lot of schools, but they really never knew what to do with me," he said. "Finally, they were going to ship me to Japan. But then all of a sudden President Truman was on the radio talking about a huge bomb that was dropped on Japan."

Thanks to the G.I. Bill of Rights signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944 - adding yet another reason for Mr. Flom's lifelong admiration for and involvement in the Democratic Party - he had the financial wherewithal to attend Harvard Law.

A Three-Lawyer Shop

As a freshly minted lawyer in 1948, he signed on as the first associate of a three-lawyer shop in Manhattan called Skadden, Arps & Slate, where he honed his talent for what was originally called "change of control" corporate transactions. Today, the specialty is unceremoniously known as hostile takeovers.

Analagous to a baseball slugger being walked by an opposing team's pitcher, lore has it that he was so successful at control change that vulnerable companies flocked to Skadden as retainer clients, in large part to establish conflict of interest should a competitor wish to hire Mr. Flom for unfriendly purposes.

Over the past 10 years, Mr. Flom estimates, his work at Skadden has been almost strictly philanthropic. He is especially proud of the fellowship program that has resulted in 92 percent of its participants continuing beyond their initial projects into full-time public service law.

"He is very central to us all," said Nisha Agarwal, 30, now completing her second year of an immigration law project at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. "But he's something of a mystery to us. He's not at all 'Oh, look at me and all the great things I've done.' He's very, very humble. Which makes his contributions all the more meaningful."

Max Weinstein, a former Skadden fellow now teaching a clinic on predatory lending at Harvard Law School, considers Mr. Flom's zeal for the fellowship program all the more "astonishing" because "it is a vehicle to launch the careers of other lawyers" rather than a showcase for "his own amazing accomplishments as a lawyer."

Like hundreds of others over the years, Mr. Weinstein and Ms. Agarwal have heard Mr. Flom make merry boast of his being perhaps the only lawyer in the city who never earned a bachelor's degree.

Mr. Williams heard the same and grew "a little tired of it," he said. He determined to put an end to such braggery.

At a City College commencement ceremony three years ago, Mr. Williams interrupted his introduction of the main speaker and pointed out Mr. Flom to graduates and guests.

"Now I'm going to do something that should have been taken care of years and years ago," said Mr. Williams. Whereupon he handed the dropout of 1941 a sheepskin, which Mr. Flom calls "my retroactive degree."

Mary Lou Edmondson, vice president for communications at City College, remembers Mr. Flom's acceptance speech upon receiving his honorary bachelor's degree.

"Joe is famously laconic," she said. "He just stood up and said, 'After City College, everything else was easy.' Then he sat down."

Life Partner

Among Mr. Flom's first bits of luck, he said, was meeting his late wife of 49 years, Claire. The two met shortly after Mr. Flom was involved in a head-on car collision in Massachusetts, which had him "strung up like Christmas lights," as he put it, while awaiting collection of a brisk insurance settlement. The money was enough to buy a home, with some left over to hire the interior decorator he eventually married.

Beginning in 1965, the Floms began their long involvement in educational work and philanthropy with Claire Flom's pet project, The Gateway School, a pioneer in special education for disabled children. The impetus for establishing Gateway, which is still in operation, was an insistence by the finest doctors in New York in the early 1960s that Claire and Joe Flom's son, Peter L. Flom, was incapable of learning.

"They said he would never go to college," Mr. Flom said. "So Claire asked, 'Then where will he go to school?' And they said, 'There isn't any school for him.' So Claire said, 'OK, then let's start a school.'"

Peter Flom was the first student enrolled at Gateway. He succeeded, and beyond. At 19, he received a bachelor's degree from New York University. Later, he earned a master's degree in special education from NYU, followed by a Ph.D. in psychometrics from Fordham University. Today, he is a statistician with the Center for Drug Use and HIV Research, National Development and Research Institutes Inc., of New York.

"He had a subtle learning disability. Like a lot of kids," said the elder Flom.

Mr. Flom's hefty list of philanthropic endeavors includes support for The Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at Princeton University and the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law.

"He has a restless curiosity about how things work," said Susan Butler Plum, director of the Skadden Fellowship Foundation, "and how to fix things that don't work."

Money is often the answer, but Mr. Flom offers nuanced advice to future philanthropists.

"You can set your guidelines, but you've got to tinker with something to make it work," he said. "It's not just about giving money away, it's making sure it's used right."

- Thomas Adcock may be reached at tadcock@alm.com.