By Wilson A. Schooley
You are part of a community not only of lawyers, but also of citizens. The ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct provide: a lawyer is “an officer of the legal system and a public citizen having special responsibility for the quality of justice.” ABA President Judy Perry Martinez said on June 5 that lawyers “have a special responsibility to address” injustices that exist “through laws that unjustly and disproportionately impact people of color.” Your County Bar Association strode toward fulfillment of that responsibility on June 3 by issuing the statement that appears on page 18 of this issue. As citizens and lawyers, we should feel the imperative of this moment to speak out. But as the statement suggests, we should also understand the history and reality that clearly show speaking out is not enough.
James Baldwin guides us: “If you don’t know what’s happened behind you, you’ve no idea what’s happening around you.” To understand Mr. Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020, and the ensuing events, start in 1619, when 13 million people were stolen from their families, dragged from their beds, shackled and starved for 8,000 miles across oceans, enslaved for two and a half centuries, and terrorized and oppressed for 100 years more. We had slaves 150 years ago. African Americans have been free for less time than they were enslaved. The economic engine of the U.S. was built on their backs. For a century, revisionist racism denying this reality entirely was patent on the pages of everything written in the U.S.
Now, 150 years later, Black American wealth is one-tenth that of white wealth. African Americans are twice as likely as whites to be unemployed, and earn 25% less. Whites get 36% more callbacks on job applications. Black drivers are 30% more likely to be pulled over by police. Black citizens are 13% of the population but 40% of the prison population. A 2012 study found a majority of doctors have “unconscious racial biases” against Black patients. Black home ownership is at an all-time low — 42% compared to 72% for whites.
Then, there are the institutional killings. African Americans make up 13% of the population. But in 2015 they accounted for 26% of those killed by police; in 2016, 24%; and in 2017, 23% — nearly twice their rate in the population. In 2018, Black Americans accounted for 38% of unarmed citizens killed by police, three times their percentage in the population. These are not random acts by rogue cops. It is a structural pattern of institutional lethal force against a race of people. Black Americans live every day with the historical reality that white on Black racism is in America’s DNA. The minute-by-minute struggle of living beneath the weight of entrenched racial oppression is like breathing polluted air — it burns, but you have to endure it with every breath, of every day, of every year you walk the earth.
Civil rights progress since slavery has invariably been punished with regression — two steps forward, one step back. Each pairing of progress and plight has left suffering and a parade of martyrs in its wake. On August 28, 1963, the King of Love’s booming baritone lifted the nation, ad-libbing a jazz poem, less a speech than a divination of inspiration; barely two weeks after Dr. King’s I Have a Dream speech, on September 15, a Klan bomb killed four little girls at the 16th Street Church in Birmingham. Fifty years later, the Black preacher’s words from that white podium in Lincoln’s shadow still roll down our cheeks. But we need to do much more than cry. We need to find the moral courage to act.
A century after “emancipation” and half a century after the Civil Rights Movement, too much of the Dream remains unfulfilled. John F. Kennedy said Americans do things “not because they are easy but because they are hard.” He was talking about going to the moon. But his words surely apply to reaching the promised land of equality on earth. We are at a racial crossroads, yet again. This is one of those historical moments that feels uncomfortably near the edge of the chasm that was the Civil War and Reconstruction. We have a moral obligation to seize it, and finally change our American racial paradigm to match our democratic ideals.
Wilson A. Schooley is a reformed big firm trial lawyer and current appellate specialist practicing primarily civil rights and indigent criminal defense law.