Known as “the man who killed Jim Crow,” the great Charles Hamilton Houston once said to his Howard University Law School students that “a lawyer is either a social engineer or a parasite on society.” And the Honorable Thurgood Marshall, his mentee, credited Houston with teaching him that “the practice of law could and should serve as a tool for creating equality in society.” As these wise words from two prominent and heroic African American social engineers indicate, the contributions of African American attorneys have and should continue to be a tool for creating equality in society.
In recent times, from the late Congressman Elijah E. Cummings and the late Congresswoman Barbara Jordan to the great Bryan Stevenson and Marianne Wright Edelman, countless African American attorneys have remained in the fight for equality and continue to fight for civil rights, social justice, and meaningful progress. They, too, are our heroes. In fact, to every social engineer who has contributed equal justice in some way, shape, or form—you are a hero too. We are our heroes. But Charles Hamilton Houston believed that attorneys were one extreme or the other, either helpful or harmful, and that there is no in between. I agree.
It’s not my intention to judge or critique what an attorney has been doing and whether it’s enough. Whatever the contribution—large or small, public or private—efforts are heroic if they contribute in some way to positive change in our society. Acknowledging that many African American lawyers nowadays did not seek a legal education to be heroic or to contribute to eliminating inequality, I believe that there is still an obligation to do so. But I realize that life often and inevitably gets in the way. How do you give back while trying to balance a demanding job, fulfill family responsibilities, and “live your best life” at the same time?
I’m asking you to consider that your best life (and the best lives of the generations behind you) might only be achieved when our collective lives are at their best—and we still have a long way to go. While we have made tremendous progress since slavery and segregation, thanks to the hard work of the social engineers committed to these causes dismantling these institutions, our plight is far from over. Black America is still currently faced with so many adverse disparities that either remain from slavery or have evolved into new methods of oppression in the form of mass incarceration, health disparities, unconscious bias encounters in all areas of life, wealth disparities, the school to prison pipeline, inequality in housing, and the persistent killing of unarmed black people, to name only a few. In short, we need more heroes to continue the fight for equality.