Payton grew up in Los Angeles, California, where he graduated from high school. He attended Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he became heavily involved in civil rights and anti-war protests. Payton was one of the founders of Pomona's Black Student Association. For three years, Payton served as an admissions officer at the Claremont Colleges, a position that he helped create to recruit black students. He graduated in 1973. He left the admissions position after receiving a Watson fellowship, which allowed him to study literature in West Africa for a year and, while abroad, he applied to law school. After being accepted at and entering Harvard Law School, Payton worked on several civil rights cases and was a member of the editorial board for the Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law Review. He graduated from law school in 1977.
D.C. Corporation Counsel and South Africa election observer
When Sharon Pratt Dixon was elected mayor of Washington, D.C. in 1991, Vernon Jordan tapped Payton to become the District's corporation counsel. As corporation counsel, he reorganized, centralized and streamlined the corporation counsel offices. Early in his term, Payton dealt with the aftermath of the Mount Pleasant riots and worked to improve Latino and police relations in the city. He also participated in balancing the city's budget in the face of a major crisis. In 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated Payton to head the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division. Following objections from the Congressional Black Caucus and despite some prominent African-American support for Payton, Payton withdrew his name for consideration. In 1994 Payton left the D.C. Corporation Counsel office to join his wife, Gay McDougall, in South Africa. Ms. McDougall was in South Africa working as a member of the Independent Electoral Commission, which ran South Africa's first democratic elections that year. Nelson Mandela was elected president. At the same time, Payton served on an international observer team that included lawyers from the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The couple remained in South Africa for several months before going back to D.C.
Returning to Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, Payton took on a civil practice that included representing corporations in employment matters, the American Legacy Foundation in its efforts to prevent youths from smoking, and Fannie Mae in a major class action challenge. While still at the firm, Payton was tapped to be the lead counsel for the University of Michigan in defending its law and undergraduate schools' use of race in their admissions processes. For more than six years, Payton handled the two high-profile cases in the trial court and in the court of appeals, and argued Gratz v. Bollinger before the Supreme Court. He organized a broad coalition from higher education, the military and top businesses in support of diversity initiatives. In a narrow decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court upheld the use of race in college admissions. Payton served as president of the District of Columbia Bar for one year in 2001. He also recently served as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, the Georgetown University Law Center and Howard University School of Law. He has been repeatedly recognized by his peers and news outlets as one of the nation's top lawyers.
