Ryan Moore '25
Historian
I grew up listening to legendary radio reporter Paul Harvey every afternoon. As the child of a single mother, my grandma played a significant role in raising my brother and I. Every day, my grandma drove us to the Metro Parks for an afternoon walk. And every day, grandma played Harvey’s ABC News broadcast. For 57 years, Paul Harvey dominated America’s airwaves. Millions of Americans tuned in daily. In the afternoons, Harvey would broadcast a segment titled “The Rest of the Story,” where he would circle back on previous reporting to update his listeners. Today, in honor of Harvey’s work, I bring you the “rest of the story” from my previous reporting on video game-legend and UVA Law grad John J. Kirby ‘66.[1] Before representing Nintendo and sailing on his $30,000 Donkey Kong sailboat, Kirby was a champion of civil and voting rights for African Americans.
Pictured: John Kirby, Jr. '66
Photo Credit: Merton College - Oxford
As a refresher, John Joseph Kirby, Jr. was born on October 22, 1939, in Falls Church, Virginia. His father was a lawyer with the US government for 40 years and helped establish the federal food stamp program and implement President Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation.[2] A Rhodes Scholar, Kirby attended Merton College at Oxford University after graduating from Fordham University.[3] At UVA Law, he won the 1966 Lile Moot Court competition and graduated the same year.
Kirby is most famous for his representation of Nintendo in a trademark case against Universal Studios over the video game character “Donkey Kong.”[4] In short, Kirby won the case, and Nintendo was allowed to continue using the name “Donkey Kong.”[5] Nintendo and video games as we know them would not exist without Donkey Kong and, in part, John J. Kirby.
But Kirby began his career fighting in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. As a summer intern in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, Kirby oversaw an FBI investigation into voting rights violations across the South.[6] Kirby’s investigation uncovered widespread evidence of voter suppression efforts targeting African Americans. This evidence was crucial in proving systemic, race-based voting rights violations and helped build the case for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
After graduating from UVA, he worked as the special assistant to the head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.[7] At the Civil Rights Division, Kirby focused on police brutality cases and civil unrest. This work took him out from behind a desk and into the field. Kirby monitored numerous protests and riots in the 1960s, including riots in Detroit, Michigan in 1967, the March on the Pentagon against the Vietnam War and Memphis, Tennessee after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. He also personally escorted African American children into desegregated schools, surrounded by members of the US Marshall Service.
Kirby left public service after witnessing the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, IL, where riot police mercilessly and indiscriminately beat everyone in sight, including onlookers, bystanders, and reporters.[8] Kirby spent the riot trying to identify individual police officers and record their badge numbers for later prosecution. The event so disillusioned him that he entered private practice, where he instead made a career in corporate litigation.
To quote the great Mr. Harvey: “now you know…the rest of the story.” And the rest of the story of John Kirby has left me melancholy. I have spent so much time researching and writing about this man’s life that I will miss him after this article is published. While Kirby remains most well known for his work representing Nintendo, I hope others will remember his career in public service. Kirby’s life is discussed further in his son’s award-winning documentary Four Died Trying, which captures the lives (and assassinations) of President Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Malcom X, and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.[9]
As we graduate from UVA Law and leave Charlottesville to begin our careers, it is worth thinking about what kind of lawyers, and what kind of people, we want to be. What do we want to be known for? I’m reminded of some of Kirby’s last words, quoted in Four Died Trying: “[T]there were people who refused to be disillusioned. There are people who went to work and have done great things. There have been loads of people who, and some of them are younger, who were out on the front lines and trenches, working toward achieving better things for us, for the society."
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tqy7zz@virginia.edu
[1] Ryan Moore, From UVA Law Student to Beloved Nintendo Character: The Story of John Kirby, Jr., The Virginia Law Weekly (Nov. 8, 2023).
[2] John Kirby, 89, Dies, Wash. Post (May 17, 1999).
[3] John Kirby, 1939-2019, Merton C. Oxford (October 9, 2019).
[4] Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Nintendo Co., Ltd., 578 F. Supp. 911 (1983).
[5] He even got a 27-foot sailboat named “Donkey Kong.”
[6] Gene Park, The real life inspiration for Nintendo’s Kirby battled for black voters, against police brutality, Wash. Post (November 20, 2019).
[7] Id.
[8] Caitlin Gibson, What happened in Chicago in 1968, and why is everyone talking about it now?, Wash. Post (July 18, 2019).
[9] https://www.fourdiedtrying.com/about