I wouldn't read too much into that. It seems like he was a "civil rights lawyer" back in the 1960s, when being a civil rights lawyer meant something - fighting against Jim Crow laws, etc. He appears to have gone off the deep end only after that. It would be a disservice to civil rights lawyers of that era to associate them with what this a**hole is doing now (or to associate them with what "civil rights lawyers" are doing now, for that matter).
This nugget is good one to drag out when the race whores don the Cloak of Moral Superiority.