Building Stronger Communities

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So, let my words be a colorful brushstroke that paints canvasses across a clear calm night.

I can see her gripping her legs tightly as she sways back and forth in the corner.   Her hair violently blows as the wind slowly creeps through the tattered broken windows and envelops her.

All she can do is bob back and forth and back and forth to try to keep her body warm. She’s trying, but failing….She’s all alone in this old wooden home, and just like no one can hear its creaks, its rustles, its shuffles as the old curtains clash against one another, and its drips as water drops from the hole in the ceiling and overflows from the bucket below, no one can hear her sniffles, no one can hear her cries reverberating around the old home, and no one can see that she’s black like you and I. 

The only difference is, like Toni Morrison, she had the bluest of eyes.  Her blue tears flow like a raging tsunami after an earthquake, like an avalanche on steep mountainous cliff, soon she’ll drown and the only thing left of her will be her young fingers extending. Reaching for something it doesn’t know. Reaching for something it isn’t certain of. Reaching for us to set her free.

Cause that poor little girl on the floor by the door, who needed more, was a metaphor.   A metaphor for underfunded school s with bars over their cracked windows reading from history books made before 9-11….but it don’t matter to 911 cause they love crack, life is a like a baseball game, 3 strikes and you’re out,  and more black men are out in prison today than were slaves in 1850.

But, here we are as black lawyers and leaders today.  The cream of the crop, on a mountain top so high that not even Pegasus can reach us.  Sitting above the clouds, we watch the rain as it falls on the potholed streets in Compton, slides down the graffitied walls in Inglewood, and washes away on the Watts blocks.

They say life is like a box of chocolate. Well, I want chocolate to get out of the box.

But we’re in a box somewhere far in the docks bolted with 3 locks under a bunch of rocks; stagnant through all these talks. 

Luckily, I have the key to set us free, we need to build a stronger community.

So, when I hear someone say they’re bored(board) with law, I say they forgot two words: Brown and Education.

When I hear someone says transformative law fails in civil society, I say be uncivil and follow martial (Marshall) law…Thurgood.

Cause there can be good when we put our minds to it, there are 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour but it does not even take a second to decide to make a change.

And even though this is the Black Law Student Association Solidarity Dinner, change does not have to be black or white, cause the man who wrote “Black or white” also wrote "We are the world, we are the children, we are the ones who make a brighter day, so let's start giving" and we give when we don't bury our talents, but instead use our talents to build a better world.  

So, let’s not go through the motions when we write motions, write motions with emotion, so that our motions can be poetry in motion, with the motion to move this community and this world forward.

Going backwards is a con, the pro is bono. Pro bono work that can change lives of mothers, fathers, children, of all colors and creeds, from calorific California to rocky Colorado, from  cold complex Connecticut to calm coniferous Kentucky, from every star-crossed state capital to every  encapsulated corner of the once 13 colonies now known as the United States of America.

And please, let’s continue to be a source of force, a recourse of resource, in other words, a workhorse, for future lawyers so that 1L, 2L, 3L, and maybe for some of y’all 4L does not have to rhyme or be synonymous at all with hell.

And  lets strive to be positive because even though Newton’s 3^rd law of physic says what goes up must come down, if we don’t get down on ourselves, but instead remain positive individually and collectively, our positivity will  never come down, and we can take our legal profession and legal field to heights that it can only dream of.

We are at the mountain top! And the dream of a preacher still lives on. It’s beautiful dream.  It’s a special dream. It’s an American dream.  It’s a dream that requires all of you and me, to set our people free by please please please building a stronger community.