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Dean Leonard M. Baynes:  Good evening!



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Good evening!



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Good evening!



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Welcome to the University of Houston Law Center, our celebration of Black History Month, and we're delighted to have with us today Danielle Holley, who's the president of Mount Holyoke



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College and former dean, or dean emerita, of Howard Law School. So let's welcome her.



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And as Dean's point of pride, I have to mention some accolades about the law school. So, the law school recently was ranked number 9



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by crossings as having the best ROI of all 200 law schools in the country, meaning that our students benefit from coming here because our tuition is relatively low, their starting salaries are very high, their bar passage rate is pretty high, and their chance of getting a job is also very high. 94% of our students



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have jobs after 10 months after graduation.



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Our students are amazing. That's one of the best things about our law school. They are very, very talented and very, very smart. They're from all different backgrounds, and our median GPA, for the entering class was 3. Almost 3.8, and the median LSAT was… median LSAT was 163.



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Which is almost 82… 82nd percentile. But at the same time, we have about 25% of the student body are first-generation college students. And so it's really proud of those accomplishments to have really excellent students, and… but students from all different backgrounds. And the faculty are amazing. They publish in top 30 law reviews, they're absolutely very, very talented. They're also caring faculty, in terms of their interactions



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with students, and we're really proud of all the faculty members who are here. Let's give the faculty and the staff a round of applause.



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I also want to recognize several notables who are in the audience, besides President Holley, and let's… the problem is, once you start doing this, you've… there's always a concern that maybe you're forgetting someone, so I apologize in advance. But I saw Ceaser Moore, who's our captain of our UHPD. Let's give a round of applause.



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And Roy Collins, who was General Counsel of New Mexico State University, I saw him earlier, let's give him a round of applause.



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And Glenn Sanford, who's the Dean of Clear Lake, one of our alums, also here. Give them a round of applause. Judge Rendón, I saw her, she's one of the first Hispanic judges, female judges, in the city of Houston, and one of our first Hispanic graduates. Welcome, Judge Rendón.



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Oh, I didn't see her, where is she? Oh, Tamecia Glover, who is one of our Board of Regents members, student regent, and a judge also. Thank you for… I didn't see her. Welcome, Tamecia, Judge Glover.



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Who else am I missing? Let's see. Tara Reid, who's head of our Black Studies Department. I saw you, Professor Reed.



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Green, I'm sorry, Green, Tara Reid is the actress, sorry.



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Apologize for that.



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Rayford Irvin, who's head of the EEOC, I saw you earlier, are you here still?



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Okay, let's give him a round of applause anyway.



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Erika Henderson, who is the Associate Provost for, I guess we're calling it Recruitment and Retention.



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Now…



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And many of our faculty, all our faculty, we said that staff, give them a round of applause. I also saw some board members, the Law alumni board members, I see Kate Blaine, who's the president of the Law Board.



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Alumni Board, and all the other board members, they're all here. Why don't you raise your hand? I… there are a lot of numerous… a lot of them, so raise your hand and give them all a round of applause for being here.



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And have I forgotten anyone? Maybe. Oh, personal note, Anthony Collier.



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Where you, Anthony? Anthony was one of our pipeline program.



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probably in its beginning, beginnings, and he went to UT Law School, not here, but we understand. Had a full scholarship there, was president of BLSA at UT, was president of National BLSA, worked for the Urban League in New York.



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was general counsel for Senator Whitmire when he was in the Senate, worked in City Hall, I don't know, am I forgetting anything, Anthony?



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But we're very proud of your accomplishments. We have a pipeline program designed for students of all different backgrounds. We give them enriching courses and LSAT prep, and we're very proud of you and all the other ones who are in that program and have succeeded so well.



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And Mariesha Keys is our Director of our pipeline program, if you want to know more about that. Mariesha Keys, I saw you earlier, I don't know where your hand… did you raise your hand? There she goes, Mariesha Keys. Thank you, Mariesha.



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So, this is really a great day, a great month for us to celebrate Black History Month, and people may say, why are we celebrating Black History Month?



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Well, I think it's important to celebrate Black History Month because it's important to know about the accomplishments of our ancestors



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in really sometimes awful situations. And whenever I have… whenever I'm counseling students, or I have my own issues, I always say to myself, imagine what my ancestors went through. That my ancestors would never, you know, they would never imagine where I am today.



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and they… Succeeded with whatever struggle they had.



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And sometimes it's unbelievable, almost unbelievable, what they accomplished



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In the times that they were, you know, the things were really, really bad.



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I mean, even to the point where sometimes I've read stories, you know, biographies of people of African descent, who in one generation went from slave



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to doctor. Or slave to lawyer. It's amazing.



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And I think that's why we celebrate Black History Month, because it's really important for us to all know



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About our own resilience as a people.



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The power of our, our determination.



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And the fact that there's so much that we, as a people, have accomplished.



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And that's really important for us to share with everyone, you know, not just in Black History Month, but every day, every month, all the time. And so, I'm proud that we've been able to have this Black History Month celebration all the time I've been dean, and I'm really glad that we have great speakers like President Holley.



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So what I'm gonna do, we're gonna sort of tag-team a little bit. So I'm gonna do an overview, and then she's gonna give, really, the… put the finishing touches and the cream, or whatever, on the cake. She's gonna make it prettier than me. So let me go begin.



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So, we're really happy to have President Holley here. As I mentioned, she was Dean Emerita… is Dean Emerita of Howard Law School as well.



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And so I'm gonna really talk about… her presentation's gonna be the past, present, and future of civil rights lawyering. I'm gonna talk about the resiliency and the progress of African American lawyers



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nationwide in the state, and she will add on to that. So, how do we get here? So, this is my example. Macan B. Allen



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He was an African-American, and in 1844, he was the first black lawyer in the country. 1844.



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When was the Civil War?



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When would you have segregation?



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1844, he became a barred in Maine, and he opened up his own practice in Charlton, South Charleston, South Carolina, and then eventually became elected a judge, and then went to Washington, D.C. 1844.



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Isn't that amazing?



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And the first African-American woman was a product of Howard Law School, Charlotte Ray. She became a lawyer in 1872 in DC, but faced discrimination based on her race and gender, and ended up becoming a public school teacher. So what you find about a lot of the early African American lawyers is that they were not able to practice.



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You know, the ones earlier than this, like Macon B. Allen, probably got… became a lawyer because they apprenticed with someone.



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You know, the old system of apprenticeship. And think about it, back in 1840-whatever, finding someone who would apprentice you was probably incredibly hard, if not impossible. So that's something also to think about Macon B. Allen.



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And I… I'm a graduate of Columbia Law School, and we always celebrate Paul Robeson.



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who graduated from Columbia Law School in 1923. He actually was not the first African-American graduate of Columbia Law School. I spoke to the dean recently, and there were people who graduated in the late 1800s. It's just that it wasn't clear that they were black because of maybe their light complexion, or they may not have actually been saying or indicating they were black, but there were a number who graduated much earlier than him, but he is certainly one of the most famous.



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of Columbia Law School's Black graduates. He was a stellar athlete, he was a Phi Beta Kappa, he just was… had excelled in a number of RC sports, and he had graduated from Columbia Law School in 1923.



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Started practicing and realized that that, that people weren't accepting him, and he became an incredible and known artist, singer, actor, and activist.



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So I'm gonna also now talk about the first African American lawyers in Texas, or graduates in Texas, at the Texas law schools.



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So, and I know, President Holley's gonna talk a little bit more about this. Her dad was the dean of Texas Southern Thurgood Marshall School of Law, I guess when I first got here, so maybe 12, 13 years ago.



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And Thurgood Marshall, it wasn't called Thurgood Marshall at the time, it was called the Law School for Negroes, I think, or School of Law for Negroes, which we don't say anymore. But it's now called Thurgood Marshall School of Law. It was established in 1946, and it was established specifically because UT, which was



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The public law school, the other public law school, did not admit black students, so they created a whole law school for just people of African descent.



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In 1946. So I don't have photos of them, because there were multiple graduates in 1946, right? So, there were multiple people who graduated from there. And Thurgood Marshall, still, to this day, actually educates the most lawyers in the state of Texas. More than half of the law school graduates, lawyers in Texas are from Thurgood Marshall, it's number one. And for Hispanics, it's number three. It produces



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The third largest number of Hispanic lawyers in the state of Texas.



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And you'll talk more about that, but Sweat was the one who brought the case before the Supreme Court, and dismantled separate but equal from law school admissions. It was a real great case as a forerunner to Brown v. Board of Education, and I know President Holley's gonna talk more about that.



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But the challenge is that Sweat was not the first black graduate, because he faced discrimination and health issues while he was in law school, and so Virgil Lott was the first black male graduate from UT Law School, and Gloria Bradford was the first black woman graduate from UT Law School, and actually the first Black person to graduate from law school



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was our, faculty member, Tony Chase's dad, who graduated from the architecture school.



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So in the 1950s, you saw St. Mary's was the first law school besides UT to graduate an African-American lawyer. Her name was Hattie Ruth Elam. She owned her private practice, a law practice.



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She was not hired by the Bexar County DA, and she was the only black female in Bexar County, lawyer in Bexar County for a large part of her career.



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And that was 19… the law school was established in 1934, she graduated in 1956. Remember, Brown was 1954, so just 2 years after Brown, she graduated from a law school in the state.



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In the 1960s, South Texas and SMU Dedman graduated their first African-American lawyers.



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So, Judge Earldean Robbins was an administrative law judge in San Francisco. She graduated from S.M. Dedman School of Law in 1925.



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I'm sorry, the school was established in 1925. She graduated from Dedman School of Law in 61, and then Mamie Proctor graduated in 1968 from South Texas College of Law, which was established in 1923.



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So this is sort of the Civil Rights era, you know, when things were changing, but a little bit late for some schools in terms of the fact that Brown was, you know, several years earlier.



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And then the first African Americans to graduate from Baylor and University Houston Law Center.



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So one is James Lemond, who's sitting in our audience right here, who graduated in 1970.



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And you must have had all the girls swooning, I guess I saw this photo.



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young women, I should say, swooning, at the time. But he became the first African-American, equity partner at the Winstead firm.



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And then Michael Heiskell, he graduated in 1974 from Baylor, and Baylor was established in 1857. It's one of the oldest law schools



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in the state, and the first black graduate was 1974. He's now, or has been, a member of the Baylor School Board of Regents. He has his own law firm, and he had gone… worked in public service criminal law before.



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Starting his own firm.



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And then, 1970s, Texas Tech is here, but Texas Tech was only started in 1967.



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So, Texas Tech is, like, a whole different story. So, having their first graduate in 1974 is actually not that big a deal, because it's actually a little bit past the Civil Rights Movement, and they only had been to law school for 5 years. So, the first graduate of their law, a black graduate of their law school, was Justice Mary Ellen Hicks. She graduated in 1974, and she was on the Court of Appeals, Second Court of Appeals.



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And then the other law schools are much newer. Texas A&M was… 2013, it was established, it used to be Texas Wesleyan, and UNT Dallas College of Law was established in 2014. So we're not really counting them, because one would presume in 2013 and 2014



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One would presume they probably have a black graduate, one would presume.



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I'm sure they do. I know they do.



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And then, in terms of our law school, in terms of deans, I'm the first African-American dean, I've served now almost 12 years.



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Those are my predecessors.



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And Texas is a very different state. We actually have up 10 deans, we have 3 Black deans, one at UNT North Dallas.



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one at Thurgood Marshall and me, and we have one Hispanic dean. So four of our deans in the state of Texas are deans of color. So that's all I have to say. I think it's important. The only thing I would say about all of this, it's important to recognize where we've come from.



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Right? So, this is where we come from. So, when you think about it, when I introduce Mr. Lemond.



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He's here.



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I'm just saying, he's here, we're thankful he's here, but he's here And he graduated in 1970.



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And he's here. So I…



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This is our lived history, right? So it's not like these things happened so long ago, they may have happened a long time ago, but they're still people who are… experience this… this experience, this situation, and his family does, and all his friends and family. And we're very proud that you chose to come to his brother also is a graduate of his brother was the first black person who was on the Order of the Barons, which was an honor society. His brother and…



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was on the Board of Regents. It's a very prominent family. His sister was at TSU as in, I think, Student Affairs or advising, is that right? And so, this is a very prominent family. We're glad that you came, and your family are prominent lawyers in the city and the state. We're very, very proud of you that you chose to come to you at University of Houston, and make a path for others to follow.



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So thank you, Mr. Lemond.



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And with that, I will turn it over to President Holley. So, President Holley, she's a professor of politics.



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She's authority on American higher education law. She's a distinguished scholar of civil rights and equity.



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She's a leading scholar of the Supreme Court. She holds her BA from Yale University and a JD from Harvard Law School. She clerked for the Fifth Circuit. She had worked for what's now the, Norton Rose Fulbright, which was Fulbright and Jaworski when she worked there. She has, she's on the Board of Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.



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in the Aspen Institute, and part of Aspen-Kern Fellow, and she previously served as Dean of Howard Law School. And we're delighted that she's here, and she's back home in Houston, and she's gonna give us her wisdom and words of advice.



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So, thank you, Dean Holley. President… President Holley!



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President Danielle Holley:  Good evening, everyone. It's so wonderful to see all of you here this evening.



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And let's see if I can advance these slides. Okay, it is great to see y'all here this evening, and it's wonderful to be home. So, as many of you heard Dean Baynes say, this is where I grew up. So, I grew up right here in Houston, and a lot of my childhood was spent right here in Third Ward.



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And so that's me. With… with my mom and my brothers making silly faces. This is our house in Missouri City, in Hunter's Glen, if any of you live in Hunter's Glen, in Missouri City, right now. Yes, a few Missouri City people here, and of course, that's me at Mount Holyoke. So I went to St. James Episcopal School right down the street. My church home is Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, which is right down the street, yes.



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And my parents were both professors at Texas Southern University. My mother was a professor at the business school, an accounting professor, and my father was a professor at the law school for about 47 years, and he was dean of the law school for 10 years. And we actually overlapped as deans. So when I was dean of Howard Law School, he was dean of Thurgood Marshall School of Law, and we…



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Yes.



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And together, we're the only father-daughter in history to be deans of ABA-accredited law schools.



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He is online right now. Hi, Dad. He's online watching this in The Woodlands. So, Dad, it's great to see you online. I know you're there right now. One of my absolute favorite things when I was at Howard, and Alexia's… here, where is Alexia?



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Is Alexia Thomas in here? She was in here before. Anyway, Alexia, a student who graduated from Howard, one of my favorite things at Howard is when students would come to me and say that their parents…



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or a sibling or a friend had been taught by my dad. And so we have multi-generational students who were taught by my dad and myself, and so that's always wonderful. I want to greet my Mount Holyoke family. We have Mount Holyoke grads. If you're a Mount Holyoke grad, please raise your hand. Yes, we're a Mount Holyoke student. So we have a lot of Mount Holyoke, community



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here in person and online. For those of you who don't know, Mount Holyoke is a wonderful college of 2,100 students. We are a women's college, one of only 24 women's colleges left in the United States, yay, for women's colleges and women's education. Mount Holyoke is the first of the Seven Sisters, if you've heard of the Seven Sisters colleges, the first colleges to believe that women could be



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educated at the level of Ivy League education. Mount Holyoke was founded in 1837 and gave rise to the Seven Sisters colleges, like Wellesley, and Smith and Barnard and Bryn Mawr, all of which still exist, and then some which have gone co-ed, like Vassar. And so, greetings to everyone there. We are still the number one producer of women who get PhDs in the life sciences. If you know women who are interested in



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getting PhDs in life sciences or in science, and we also have produced graduates like Chloé Zhao, who is nominated for an Academy Award right now for Hamnet, only the second woman in history to get a Best Director Academy Award. So Mount Holyoke is full of incredible historical graduates, like Emily Dickinson and others, and really vibrant graduates of today, like Chloé Zhao and many others.



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I also have to greet my Howard Law family. If you're a Howard Law graduate, say hi right now. Yes, we have a few Howard Law graduates who are in the house, and it's so gra… I'm so grateful for my Howard Law family. I want to extend greetings to the entire University of Houston faculty and staff, and of course, to Dean Baynes. I've admired Dean Baynes since I was a baby law professor.



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like a baby, baby law professor is when I first met Dean Baynes.



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And I just truly, truly admire everything that you continue to do for the legal profession.



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you are a phenomenal leader and true visionary for the profession, and I'm grateful for your continued leadership, not just here at University of Houston, but for the legal academy in the country. So, I'm here tonight to talk about some of my passions, which are really around… and I'll exchange a lot of these terms, and so I want to make that clear now. I'm here to talk about two of my passions, which are, number one.



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the way that we create and produce more Black lawyers for the United States.



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And to think about civil rights lawyering in particular, knowing that that's not a complete overlap, right? So not all black lawyers who graduate become civil rights lawyers. Black lawyers do all kinds of amazing work, including the work that I did when I was in practice, which was antitrust and securities work.



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And also, civil rights lawyers come in every shade and hue and ethnicity and national origin, including some of our greatest civil rights lawyers, like Jack Greenberg and others. But tonight, I'll be talking about, in particular, Black lawyers and also Black lawyers who have been civil rights lawyers and may want to be civil rights lawyers. And that passion for me really did come from Thurgood Marshall School of Law, and I see some people from



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Thurgood Marshall, if you're associated with Thurgood Marshall School of Law, say hi. Yes, so we have some Thurgood Marshall School of Law people in the house, and it really came from that passion. As a child, I ran around the building of Thurgood Marshall, and to me, the lawyers were black.



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The lawyers were Latin, the lawyers were Asian, the lawyers were white. It was a multiracial…



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very multiracial lawyering community, and that's the community that I grew up in at Thurgood Marshall. And so that developed a passion for me. That and the fact that my mother was raised in the Jim Crow South, right here in Brazoria County. Tracing my family history, my family history on my maternal side goes back in Brazoria County to the early 19th century. In fact, when you look at the first census that counted



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African Americans in the 19th century, you'll see that my maternal family ancestry, the place where they were before they were counted in Brazoria County was Africa.



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So they came from Africa, from the shores of Africa, to Galveston, and then to Brazoria County, so my roots are really here in Texas on this land, and so it's really, really special to be with all of you tonight.



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So I want to first talk about the history of Black lawyers and civil rights lawyering, then I'll talk about the present, and then I'll talk about the future. And so I do want to start by talking about Heman Marion Sweatt.



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And Heman Sweatt is really, even though he never technically became a lawyer, he's one of the most important figures in Black history in terms of the development of Black lawyers.



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Heman Sweatt wasn't famous, he wasn't wealthy, and he wasn't trying to make history. He was a black postal worker right here in Houston who, in 1946 did something both extraordinary and radical. He applied to the University of Texas School of Law.



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He met every academic requirement, and he wanted to study the law and be of benefit to his state. And he was denied entry to the University of Texas solely because of his race.



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That denial of admission mattered, because law school was never just about a degree for Sweatt and for many others who aspired to law school. It was, and it remains, the gateway to judgeships, to policymaking, to economic security.



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to the idea of who gets to interpret the Constitution rather than merely live under the Constitution. So excluding Black students from legal education was a way of deciding in advance who would have power in the state of Texas and who would not.



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But Sweatt didn't stand alone when he decided that he wanted to go to the University of Texas.



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He… his case was part of a carefully constructed legal strategy led by the NAACP's legal team, including Thurgood Marshall, who understood that segregation could be dismantled, not only through protest, but through precision.



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And Sweatt was represented primarily by attorneys from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, including Thurgood Marshall and Robert Carter.



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And so, this is a little bit after, and I'll skip a little bit forward, just because I wanted you to see Marshall in this picture, and some of the desegregation that happened almost 15 years after Sweatt was decided.



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Alright.



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So, he was represented nationally and at the Supreme Court by Thurgon Marshall and Robert L. Carter, but in the Texas proceedings, when he first filed suit against the University of Texas, he was actually represented by two black attorneys in Texas, William J. Durham and C.B. Bunkley, and I want to say a few words about those attorneys, because they're very much hidden figures. Has anyone in the room ever heard of William Durham or C.B. Buckley?



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Very good, so we have a few people who have heard of these lawyers. So William J. Durham was a black civil rights activist and attorney. He was born on a farm near Sulphur Springs, Hopkins County, Texas, in 1896, to Dean Baynes's point. We had lots of lawyers who did not formally go to law school. In fact.



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Attorney Durham, he went to one semester at Emporia State College in Kansas, and then he served in the United States Army in France in World War I.



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After that, he apprenticed. He studied law in the office of Ben F. Gafford, who is a white attorney in Sherman, Texas, who literally risked his life to apprentice William Durham.



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And after Durham passed the bar exam in 1926, he established his practice in Sherman and began taking on civil rights cases.



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Even though in the Sherman riot of 1930, a lynch mob actually burned the black business district in Sherman, including his office. And even though he was almost lynched and his office was burned, he continued to practice law, including representing Sweatt. He had a associate, and his associate was C.B. Bunkley, who was from Dallas and a civil rights activist.



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Attorney Bunkley was born on July 21st, 1921. He attended Denison Public Schools and completed his secondary education in 1937. He did graduate from college, he graduated from Prairie View A&M with a BA in political science, and he earned his law degree from the University of Michigan in 1944. So Sweatt was represented both by black attorneys at the national level.



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And at the local level, and they were very, very powerful in terms of their ability to theorize the case.



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So now I want to say a little bit more about the national attorneys, which included Thurgood Marshall. So, one of the things that really spurred me on when I was thinking about whether I would actually go to law school was hearing the story of the legal theories and the group of lawyers who really were active during the Civil Rights Movement that started at Howard's Law School. So the vice dean of Howard's Law



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in the 1920s, from 1929 to 1935, was a man named Charles Hamilton Houston.



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And Houston had the idea that every student who went to Howard should be trained to represent clients while they were in law school. So it was the birth of the clinician program, the birth of clinical legal practice. And so, Marshall graduated from Howard Law School in 1933, and while he was in school, he trained with Houston and his class



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classmates.



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People like Spottswood Robinson and others who became kind of what I call the murderer's row of civil rights lawyers, right? They studied together at Howard, and Houston would actually moot cases with them for the Supreme Court while they were at Howard, and they would walk together. So, initially, the Howard Law School building was only a few blocks from the Supreme Court.



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They would walk together after they mooted cases like Sweatt's case, they would walk together to the Supreme Court to then argue those cases.



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And while they were at Howard, they began to think that they needed a full legal strategy for how they would dismantle Jim Crow segregation, how they would dismantle the proposition of separate but equal that came from Plessy versus Ferguson. And one of the first major wins that they got towards that strategy happened with Sweatt versus Painter.



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And so in Sweatt, they essentially argued that a separate institution for Black students, which is what Texas created, they created a building in the basement, essentially for Sweatt to attend school, but they argued



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Marshall and Carter argued that there could never truly be a separate but equal law school, because law schools are made up of something special. They're made up of faculty stature, institutional prestige, alumni influence, and access to professional networks.



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And because of that argument, the Supreme Court decided unanimously that these intangible factors mattered, and that this law school that they created in the basement could never truly provide Sweat with an equal education, and therefore they ordered that he be able to attend the University of Texas.



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And this was not an accidental strategy, right? They knew, if you notice, that Sweatt was decided, Sweatt v. Painter was decided in 1950, and only 4 years after that, the Supreme Court decided that separate was inherently unequal in Brown v. Board of Education. So Sweatt v. Painter was one of the most important steps towards the decision in Brown, and a very intentional legal strategy.



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And of course, as Dean Baynes mentioned, although Heman Sweatt paid a severe personal price



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for this lawsuit. He never finished law school, his health suffered tremendously, and his life was altered in what anyone could describe as a negative way. But his legacy obviously endures.



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the school, which was then called by the state of Texas, the Texas State University for Negroes when it was established in 1946. In 1948, that school, the Texas School for Negroes, moved to Houston and eventually was renamed as the Thurgood Marshall School of Law. And that's why, even to this day, Thurgood Marshall School of Law is known as the house



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that sweatt built.



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And so when we ask the question of what did Sweatt really give rise to? We know it gave rise to the life of this enduring law school. We know it gave rise to the notion that separate is inherently unequal when it comes to legal education, and so the question is, where are we now, right? So, 76 years after Sweatt v. Painter was decided.



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Where do we stand in terms of Black students, and also.



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Black law students who want to become civil rights lawyers. As we know, obviously, the doors of law schools have been opened to Black students



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since the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and since Sweatt, and Black lawyers, of course, have served as judges, scholars, advocates, public servants, and the President of the United States.



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The legal profession today looks profoundly different than it did in 1950, before Heman Sweatt… when Heman Sweatt won, his lawsuit, but we have made significant progress.



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The best current national data indicates that Black lawyers make up about 5% of all U.S. attorneys, a share that it's been essentially flat for at least a decade.



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In 2020, this 5% share corresponded to an estimated attorney population of about 1.33 million attorneys, meaning that in the United States right now, there are roughly 65,000 to 70,000 African Americans, people of African descent, who are attorneys.



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By 2025, the total U.S. lawyer population had grown further, but the percentage of African American attorneys remains at about 5%, and it's actually going down. It was about 4.91%.



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So when we look at historical patterns, what we see is a rise of Black lawyers and then a leveling off that happened in the 1990s that we literally have not seen any increase in share for Black lawyers since that time.



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Black law students today, and the question is why. I have this picture up because Barbara Jordan is one of the lawyers who I most admire, and she's obviously a representation of the kind of lawyers that came along after Sweatt, won Sweatt vs. Painter. I am so honored to be here tonight with Jim Lemond.



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and his daughter, Angela. And Angela is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, yes.



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And so, when we think about



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the lawyers of today, and the current challenges that we see for lawyers for Black lawyers of today, and I have Janae Nelson, who's the current director, counsel, and president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund as a representation of Black lawyering today.



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We are still part of only 5% of the profession, and the question is why, right? So one of the… we have barriers still to entry to the profession. Many Black students, when they graduate from undergrad, when they graduate from college, they have significant debt, and so they think very carefully about whether they can afford more education, including law school. So that continues to be a barrier.



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for Black students who are seeking out legal education.



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Black students are more likely to be first generation, which means they need more help understanding what does it mean to take the LSAT? Where should you apply to law school? How do you finance your legal education? All of those questions are very much still in mind when we think about first-generation law students, which Black students tend to be more likely than other students to be first-generation.



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They're more likely to experience isolation, so when we hear that there are… and luckily here at Law Center has a very healthy number of Black students, but there are lots of law schools of the 200 around the country where you may find yourself, if you're a Black student, to be one of only 10 in your class, or there have been times when especially Black male students end up being the only one in their class.



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So that sense of real isolation at law schools and in the legal profession also can really make a difference in terms of whether a student decides to go to law school or whether they actually graduate from law school. It can make a big difference, that sense of isolation.



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continued under-representation. So while Black students, Black graduates are 5% of the profession.



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People of African descent make up 13% of the American population, which means that Black lawyers are still severely underrepresented in the legal represent, which that feeling of underrepresentation can also cause people not to want to go to law school, but also to struggle once they come into the profession.



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And finally, there's lots of intangible factors, and these include some of the things that the Supreme Court talked about in Sweatt in 1950.



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Can Black students and graduates, are we able to form networks, sponsorships, get sponsors where we work? Are we able to be seen as lawyers who are identified with prestige? Do we have institutional support in the places that we work? All of that can really impact the ability for us to turn people who are interested in being lawyers into law



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students, and then turning those law students into licensed lawyers. All of the things I just talked about can be barriers to that.



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And civil rights lawyering itself has also changed. So one of the interesting things about leading a school like Howard University School of Law is many people come to Howard to be civil rights lawyers. It is still the home of civil rights law. So I got to watch up close for 9 years what it means to try to inspire a group of Black law students to become civil rights lawyers.



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And there are a lot of difficulties for doing that.



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First, the target was, at Sweatt's time, explicit racial exclusion. And today, inequality is much more legally sophisticated.



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Discrimination is often reframed as neutrality, and sometimes discrimination, as we heard from the EEOC and Department of Justice last week, is actually reframed as discrimination against white Americans instead of the historic discrimination that we've been talking about here.



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Structural inequity is described as inevitability, and courts are more skeptical of systemic claims and civil rights enforcement itself is frequently treated with suspicion, especially if it's civil rights enforcement on behalf of people of African descent. It is often frequently treated with suspicion.



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A perfect example of this is SSFA, the affirmative action case from two years ago. If you read the majority opinion in SSFA, you would probably have no idea that Harvard University or the University of North Carolina had any history of racial discrimination against Black students and other marginalized groups. It's not until you read the dissents that you realize that there is a broader historical



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context.



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to the idea of affirmative action. Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, where I sit on the executive committee and was the co-chair for many years, we actually intervened in that case and argued at the Supreme Court on behalf of Black and Latin A students, partly because we felt that Harvard, University of North Carolina, and SSFA were not properly representing the ideas of



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how Black students and Latin A students were very isolated in the Harvard and University of North Carolina community. So as civil rights lawyers, we felt that we needed to actually represent the students themselves, which we felt that the universities were not doing, and we were able to argue in the Supreme Court, unfortunately not successfully, on behalf of those students. But SSFA is a perfect example where only



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Streaming Media: 60 years after Harvard was truly integrated, only 60 years after University of North Carolina was fully integrated, the Supreme Court of the United States says that to have programs that consider race is actually a detriment under the Constitution instead of being something that repairs historical discrimination and



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and promotes racial diversity, which is an indication of how difficult civil rights lawyering is in this moment. You can even look



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to, you can even look to what's happening in Texas. Part of the reason I picked this picture is Janae Nelson and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund have been litigating a lot of cases here in Texas, not to very much success, right?



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So, when you think of cases like LULAC, Fair Maps Texas Action Committee versus Abbott, this is civil rights action in which LULAC, the National Redistricting Foundation, the NAACP, MALDEF, and the League of Women Voters challenged Texas' post-2020 maps as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders and violations of Section 2, and were not successful under that suit.



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So what do we know about the future of civil rights lawyering?



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Oh, I said that point.



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So we know that it's not going to look a lot like this, right? So this is Marshall sitting on the steps of the Supreme Court, surrounded by, mostly people who were his clients in school desegregation cases, right?



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And this notion of the civil rights lawyer kind of dropping into your community, maybe, you know, with local attorneys, like we talked about with Buckley, these days are largely gone, right? The scale of what we do in civil rights lawyering and thinking about the future is much more complicated, even though we know that Marshall and that team climbed a very, very steep hill to get us



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To the point where Jim Crow was struck down.



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the challenges of today, in some ways, are just as challenging as the ones that Marshall faced, and maybe even more complicated.



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So how do we begin to think about what we as Black lawyers will do in the future, and what we will do as civil rights lawyers?



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The law is never neutral in its effects, and lawyers who are committed to justice must be willing to name inequality plainly, even when it is unpopular. So the first thing the future of civil rights lawyering requires is it requires moral clarity. And I talked to the students in Balsa about this today.



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It requires us speaking the truth about history, and in a climate where government wants to convince us that racial discrimination is gone or is actually really more represented by reverse discrimination, which is a completely ahistorical and inaccurate reading.



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We have to be able to tell the truth and talk about history. It is more important than ever, even when it's restricted by state law as it is here in Texas, and as it is in 12 other states.



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And even when it may lead, as it has to places like Texas A&M and Clemson and plenty of other places, to getting your class canceled or your department dismantled, we are still required to tell the truth.



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Second, it requires legal imagination.



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And legal imagination means we need to think about justice as shaped not only in courtrooms, but inside law schools, firms, agencies, and the courts.



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By decisions about who is trained, who is mentored, who is promoted, whose harm is taken seriously. All of those things are part of how we create change, how we think about the future of civil rights law. Lawyers must be committed to justice and must be willing to challenge institutions from within, and not just critique them



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from the outside.



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It also requires solidarity. No one can do this work alone. Civil rights progress has never been the work of a single community acting alone. I talked about Jack Greenberg and many others, the lawyers who trained people like Buckley. This is something that all of us need to work on together, envisioning the future of a multiracial democracy, which is what the United States is.



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And finally, it requires stamina. Civil rights law is not a sprint.



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This is a really long-term, problem that we have to solve. We have to figure out, how does the Constitution of the United States, how do our statutes, how do our regulations, how do our state constitutions and state regulations support a world in which we can all believe that it is made for us?



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So let me end where I began, and then I'm happy to take your questions.



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Sweatt never became the lawyer he set out to be.



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But because of him, and because of the lawyers who stood beside him, generations of people who look like him, and many who do not, were finally allowed to enter rooms of legal power that had long been closed.



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And that is the paradox of civil rights law. One person's sacrifice becomes another person's opportunity.



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And that opportunity is sitting in this room.



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Everyone who studies the law today benefits from the choices made by people who had far less protection, far fewer guarantees, and far more to lose than we have today.



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You inherit a profession that has been bent, never perfectly, but meaningfully towards justice.



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Which means the question before all of us today is not whether we practice law, for most of us we already are, but for students, this is a question about whether you will practice law, it is how you will practice it.



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This moment does not require every lawyer to become a civil rights litigator, but it does require every lawyer to decide whether justice is merely a value they admire, or a responsibility that they are willing to carry. So my call to action is this.



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Learn the law deeply, practice it ethically, challenge it when it fails, and use it deliberately, courageously, and persistently in service of justice.



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Because the future of this country, the future of civil rights, will not be written only in Supreme Court opinions or history books. It will be written by the lawyers who choose to pursue it.



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Thank you so much.



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All right, I'm happy to take your questions. I think we have time for that, yes.



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We have about 15 minutes for questions, and I think we have a mic right there. I would only ask when you ask a question if you just state your name and tell me who you are.



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So that I have an idea, but I'm happy to answer your questions. We have one right here. Oh, great, okay.



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Professor Tara Green:  Professor Green. Not Reid.



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Thank you so much for your charge, and welcome back to Houston.



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So my question is, as department chair of African American Studies, so… so our students are looking to the future.



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Many of them do want to go to law school, and they will get into law school. When I ask them, what do you want to be? What area of law do you practice? It's either corporate law.



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or personal injury.



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again, I'm chair of African American Studies, so I'm like, where are the civil rights, future civil rights attorneys? It seems to be… I don't know if it's money, if it's civil rights isn't sexy anymore, I don't… I don't know. But, so I'm just wondering,



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What your advice is, as we prepare these students for these careers that they will probably enter into.



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How are we… how should… what should we be thinking about as we prepare them, and hopefully to think about justice, whatever that looks like, wherever that is?



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President Holley:  Very good. Thank you so much for that question. The question, I think everyone heard it online, was essentially.



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how do we think about… there are many black students who want to go to law school, but not many of them anymore say that they want to be civil rights attorneys. They'll say corporate, they'll say personal injury, they'll say lots of things, but not civil rights law. So I want to first say a word in favor of corporate law, which may not be the most popular answer, but, you know, the truth is that we break barriers when we go into a lot of these fields, which is an important act of inclusion.



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Right? It's an important act of being in spaces that we have not been in before. When I taught at the University of South Carolina School of Law, I was the first Black woman to be on that full-time faculty. That was in 2005.



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And when I practiced at Fulbright and Jaworski, which is now Norton Rose Fulbright, there were not a lot of Black attorneys in that space, and so it was an important moment. Now, when I meet Black attorneys who are at Norton Rose, I feel very proud of the fact that I was one of the people who helped to make that a space in which people felt like they could practice. And corporate lawyers, again, when you're the only one in the room, which I was a lot of time on antitrust cases.



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It makes a difference. It makes a real difference how judges behave, how other lawyers behave.



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How we think about what is



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what the community needs, meaning the United States community, in places like antitrust, which we don't typically think about. So that's just… and personal injury, the same thing. So that's just a little, on that front. In terms of civil rights lawyering, it's hard, because number one, you make no money.



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Right? You're going to go the rest of your life… you know, Charles Houston died right at the time of Sweatt. He worked himself to death and died at his desk with nothing to his name.



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Yes.



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Civil rights lawyering is not glamorous. When you read, I like to… when… with young lawyers, I like to tell them to read The Devil in the Grove, which is a story about Thurgood Marshall when he was very young.



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they risk their lives every day, right? And even today, when I talk to Damon Hewitt, who's the Executive Director of Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, Janae Nelson, who I pictured, these people travel around with full security details.



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Because their lives are threatened every day. So being a civil rights lawyer is not easy. You have to have a real passion for it. What I tell students is to, number one, think about, first.



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who do you want to impact the most, right? Because that's the question that many times they don't ask, is with your law degree, who is it that you want to impact? Do you want to impact your family? Do you want to make things better for your family? Is it your community that you live in? Is it the United States? Is it the globe? Where do you want to have impact? And then, what will help you to make that impact that you want to make? It may be that you don't work full-time.



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as a civil rights lawyer, but you may run for school board.



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You may run for Congress. When I look at the Hall of Fames here of the Latin lawyers, of the LGBTQ lawyers, of the Black lawyers, there are Hall of Fames if you walk around this building everywhere. And when I see the civil rights pioneers that have graduated from Law Center, many of those people were not civil rights lawyers the whole time, but they were judges.



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Right? And they impacted the law that way. Or they ran for Congress eventually, or they did other things that helped them make an impact similar to what civil rights lawyers may be, but without doing that. But we have to also talk to students about the history of civil rights lawyering. Many of our students have never heard of Pauli Murray.



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Streaming Media: Right? So Pauli Murray, who is one of the most influential civil rights lawyers in the country, she graduated from Howard Law School in 1944. She helped to found the National Organization for Women, and she, in her senior thesis, had the idea that separate was inherently unequal. And she wrote her senior thesis, and Spottswood Robinson, who was her professor, almost failed her for writing that, because he was like, this is a ridiculous idea.



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the Supreme Court will never believe it, and eventually they essentially took her idea and put it into the Brown briefs. But many of your students would be inspired.



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Right. By the work of people like Barbara Jordan, etc. And I find that many Black lawyers, civil rights lawyers, are still hidden figures, which means we need to bring them forth to inspire the next generation of students.



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Dean Leonard M. Baynes:  And one thing, President Holley, you had mentioned the… we had talked many years ago about the Konica case.



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The Fifth Circuit case that dealt with agency issues that you worked on when you were a law clerk to your judge, and I don't know if you want to briefly mention that, about agency, and… I was like, oh my gosh, 



President Danielle Holley:  you're testing my memory now, which is terrible. But I think even as law clerks, right, so when we have… so I clerked on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. My judge at the time, Judge Carl Stewart, who's an amazing judge for any student who's thinking about clerking.



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We had a case at that point that was a racial discrimination case, and when you are one of the only Black law clerks



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on the entire court.



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there are things that sometimes you can tell other law clerks and other judges about the experiences, the personal lived experiences that you've had. And so in that way, on… as a law clerk, right, we were making an impact on the way that the law was shaped simply by being present and being willing to talk with law clerks and judges about our own lived experiences.



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Those are the kinds of impacts that when Black lawyers graduate, when we're licensed, when we're clerking, when we're judges, when we're partners, when we're deans of law schools.



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We can be present to help people understand what the impact of their decisions are, what the impact of the law is, and what the impact is on everyday communities and everyday people.



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Dean Leonard M. Baynes:  I think, there's a question online, is that what I heard? Yes? And we have about 400 people online, or so?



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About 160 people have… oh, hi everyone online, great to see you.



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But they didn't get the good food you guys got.



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Associate Dean Sondra Tennessee: So, this question is from a prospective student.



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Would you recommend going to law school in the state you want to practice in?



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Or should I choose Howard?



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And then…



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I know, right? And then look into local jobs in Texas. 



President Danielle Holley:  That's so interesting. So, of course, I'm going to say, choose Howard, I hate to say that, here at Law Center. Dean Roger Fairfax will thank me later, but there are some truly national law schools in the United States, there's no doubt about that. I went to Harvard, I came here, I've never been licensed anywhere other than in Texas. So I'm a licensed Texas lawyer.



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went to Harvard. Terrence, who's sitting right there, is a licensed Texas lawyer who went to Howard. There are some truly national law schools, there's not that many of them. I think it's a good idea, for the most part. Where you want to practice is probably where you should go to law school, unless you're choosing one of these incredibly well-recognized national law schools that… where you can come home and practice very easily, and have great networks. So that's the thing as a lawyer.



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you're always going to need very good networks to help you, support you in your practice. The question is, where can you find those networks? A lot of time, you find them through law school, which means it's nice to practice where you went to law school and have that network. But if you attend, you know, if you have to, you know, if you can't go to Howard, and you need to go to a place like Harvard or Yale, then, you know, that's fine too, and you can find



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you know, your place in the jurisdiction where you want to practice, but I think most of the time it works out well when you go to law school near where you want to practice.



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Absolutely, Law Center. Yes.



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Dean Leonard M. Baynes: Any other… there we go, a couple of questions back there. Let me go all the way to back.



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Get my steps in after eating all that great food.



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Question:  Hi, President Holley, Michelle Taylor-Watts, My Holyoke Class of 19-something or the other. 



President Danielle Holley:  Hi, Michelle. Also, the president of My Holyoke Club of Houston, I'm so happy you're here.



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Question:  I love the framing of the legal imagination, because imagination isn't always a word you hear after legal. So I'm wondering, how might



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civil rights activists who aren't attorneys tap into this idea of the legal imagination? 



President Danielle Holley:  You know, this is such a great question, especially… so the question was, how do we tap into the legal imagination, which I didn't have time to really talk about.



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Very much. So, when I say the legal imagination, I'm saying we need to think of legal frameworks and theories and problem solving that has maybe never existed, right?



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So when Marshall and Murray and Spottswood Robinson and Robert Carter and all of these people began to think of how they would dismantle Jim Crow segregation.



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they tried a lot of different things. You know, the imagination requires you to think of lots of different solutions and try them, practice them.



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they may not work, and then you try something else, right? They had that spark of imagination when they said, you know what, they say separate is equal, but, you know, that's not our lived experience, so let's go around with, you know, little, like, early cameras, early motion picture cameras, and they filmed all of the various… and you can see them… I really encourage you to watch a movie called The Man Who Killed Jim Crow.



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And it's a movie that's about Charles Hamilton Houston, and it has a lot of those, like, 8mm films that they did in the South at the time. And so from those films, they said, you know, we think we can convince courts with these films that actually the schoolhouses that we're seeing in the South are not anywhere close to equal. But that was a feat of imagination.



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Right? How do you defeat a 100-year-old Legal proposition that's separate



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but equal is the law of the day, and they thought of lots of different things to get them there. So now I'll give an example, and again, this may not be a popular example, but reproductive rights, right? So women gained their reproductive rights under Roe vs. Wade, they lost their reproductive rights



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two years ago in the Supreme Court. The question is, if women in the United States want reproductive rights, how do they imagine what the next vision of gaining our reproductive rights back looks like?



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It can't… it probably won't look like Roe, so is it that the Supreme Court told us in Dobbs that this is a state-by-state situation, so we go state by state and try to get constitutional amendments at the state level that provide women with reproductive rights? Maybe that's the imagination that we have, but any legal problem that you want to solve that maybe has been solved before and is not now solved, or has never been solved.



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solved requires you to try different things, to think about what the possibilities are, and to never limit yourself. I was telling Balsa students today, I said, you may have to… the founders never imagined a truly multiracial democracy, a democracy in which 19% of our population is Latin A, we have 13% that are Black Americans, we have almost



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8% that are Asian American. We're headed towards a 45% group of people who do not identify as white in the United States.



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how do we have a constitution that works in our multiracial democracy? That's a feat of imagination. That's not something that we imagined 250 years ago, and so the question is, how do we all move forward together, and what does it take? What are the legal frameworks that it takes to make that possible? And that will take all of us together, reimagining who we are as a people, and what is the best way



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For us all to live together under the rule of law.



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Dean Leonard M. Baynes:  I think there was another… let me… I'll get you… let me take this one.



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Question: Hello, my name is Erin Brown. I'm a currently here at the University of Houston. I want to thank you for speaking to us earlier and taking my question now. My question for you today would be, I know earlier you talked about the feeling of isolation students of color can have moving through these institutions.



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How do you suggest that students overcome that feeling while also maintaining, and being authentic to who they are at the same time, but overcoming that feeling to connect with peers that may not look like them, but also, again, being authentic to who they are?



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President Danielle Holley: That's a great question. How do you stave off isolation and also find a way to be authentic to who you are? I think that's a wonderful question. For me, wherever I've gone in the legal profession, I've always found community.



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And so I would say, wherever you are.



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whatever the circumstances, always find community, right? And so I'll describe some of the communities that I've found over time. When I worked in big law, honestly, my community was mostly women attorneys. There weren't a lot of women at Fulbright at the time, but I found that I would go to women all over the firm and ask for work. I didn't care whether it was in bankruptcy, were they appellate lawyers, wherever they were, I was seeking out the senior women in the firm to ask them for work.



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And a lot of them would give me work even though I wasn't on their team, right? When I came into the legal academy, I found that there were an entire group of senior Black law professors who I could tap into and talk to, and find that… and eventually, there were enough of us that we formed something called Ludi Lytle, which is a collective of Black women law professors, right? And even now, as a college or university president.



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I have a group of college and university presidents who I started on the same day with, July 1st, 2023. We all started on the same day, and now they're my community of practice. So, presidents from everywhere, from Bates.



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College all the way to Pomona, all the way to places like Tufts and Boston University. That's my current community of practice, because those are the presidents I started with. So almost every part of your career, you will find like-minded people. You have to look for those people, and you have to look for them across race and gender. So that's the other thing that I'll say.



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Some of my most important mentors in the law and in the academy look nothing like me.



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Right?



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And I had to be willing to think about, and my mentors thought about, what do we have in common? And so I would say, most of what we had in common was around the law itself. So I have a real passion for legal education. The former dean who I worked for at the University of South Carolina is passionate about legal education. We could not be more different in terms of the way we look, our identities, or our politics are



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polar opposite. But we absolutely believe that the University of South Carolina School of Law was a great law school, and we wanted to make sure that everyone knew that and move the law school forward. So that's the other thing I would say. Find your people, find your community of practice, but don't limit who that is. Be open to the idea that this could be lots of people who would be your mentor, who would be your sponsor.



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who will be someone who will move with you as you move through your practice. But just be attuned to that, and never think you can go alone.



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So that's the other thing I would say, is as much isolation as you may feel, as a lawyer, it's impossible for you to go alone. You have to always go with other people, so be attuned to that at all times in terms of finding that, what I like to call the community of practice.



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Question:  Good evening, President Holley. Thank you so much for coming back home. Yes. You've had a very impressive career.



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look back on it and think of other young people online and everything. Is there anything that you'd do different? What fortitude helped you



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persist.



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President Danielle Holley: That's a great question. So what would I do different? I have so many things I would do different. I mean, not… not that I consider any of those to be regrets. I tell students all the time, there's never been a job that I didn't get that I regretted. There's never been a move that I did make that I said, oh, I should have done that, instead of something else. I find the regret isn't particularly helpful, and you tend to, at least for myself, and I know it's not true for everyone, but my feet tend to land where they should.



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should be, right? And you have to begin to trust that in yourself, trust your own voice, your own instincts, and not follow prestige. Stop chasing prestige is one thing that I tell people all the time. If you're always chasing rankings, how much money you make, all those things, you're gonna be just inherently unhappy all the time. So, do the things that feel best for you. Those are not the things that feel right for other people all the time. You have to be



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You know, kind of true to your own voice, true to your own instincts.



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I regret not taking off a little bit of time before law school. I was what my property professor called a 17th grader.



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So, I went straight through law school. I had never filed my taxes when I went to law school. I was 22 years old, and when I graduated, I had just… I was sworn in when I was 25, right?



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I knew nothing about anything. I knew nothing about the world. I knew nothing about almost anything. I think I would have probably enjoyed and benefited from my legal education more with a little bit more life experience. So I tell students that a lot, you know, take off a year, take off two years. It's great to go to law school after you've been out of



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out of… after you've been out of undergrad for a little while, it helps give you better perspective, and you get more out of it. In terms of the money that you pay, you're gonna get more for your money if you have a little bit more life experience, I believe that.



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I think the only other regret is, I would say, you need to move on sooner from situations that don't work, right? And I… again, that's about everything.



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And I'm mostly saying that about… honestly, I'm saying it mostly about personal lives.



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you know, I just think that a lot of people stay in situations, marriages, relationships, friendships, all those things that don't work for them, don't serve them well. They continue day after day, month after month, year after year, they're miserable. Put all that down and pick up something new. And that is literally a later-in-life revelation. I do not continue to do things that don't serve me. Put those things down and pick up something else.



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Yeah.



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Dean Leonard M. Baynes: Let me take two more questions, so one over here, one here, so you can go first.



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And I'll be over there in a second.



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Question: Thank you so much for coming to speak to us. My name is June Liu. I am a management consultant, but my passion project is reducing social and political polarization. So, when you talk about civil rights wins.



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The lens that I see it through is a lens of changing social norms, right? And social norms have a huge impact.



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on how we experience the world. And…



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it, it actually really impacts, has a great impact in reducing extremism. They've studied this, they've done brain scans on terrorists, and found that when they realize that the social norms are not as they think, then their extreme… extremism is reduced.



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And, the generation that has come after the Civil Rights era has benefited from changing social norms, but obviously.



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it has not gone far enough, because now we are seeing a reversal, right? Or perhaps an explosion of what had already existed. And civil rights lowering



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May not go far enough.



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So, what can… what partnerships can the legal profession form to impact the social norms so that the changes take root on a personal level?



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President Danielle Holley: That's such a great question about the changing of social norms, because I think what we've realized is there's obviously… there are really, really clear boundaries and limits to what the law can do, right?



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We can change the statutes, we can change the regulations, we can change the Constitution itself.



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And the truth is, if we have a society that still deeply believes that inequality serves them well, inequality will continue, right? Inequality is pervasive because people believe that it actually serves them.



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They believe that social norms which create inequality in terms of income, inequality in terms of race, inequality in terms of gender, sexual orientation, people truly believe, many people do, I'm better off if other people are not doing well, right?



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So that social norm, even if it's one that people cannot consciously talk about, right?



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even if it's just deep in here, right, and it's not spoken, we're seeing that everywhere, and it's part of the history of our country, is…



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thinking that social norms are better when they create more inequality. So, I'm really glad that you're working on political polarization. It's one of the things that we need to work on most. We do need to work on social norms.



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I think with this generation, one of the things that's most challenging is the ability to get the attention of anyone for long periods of time about anything.



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Right?



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how can I… how can I change social norms if I can't get your attention for more than 20 minutes today? Right? Let alone tomorrow, let alone next week. So, we just had Judy Richardson, who's one of the founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee on campus at Mount Holyoke. One of the things that was most interesting to me is she was talking about the training of civil rights workers when they did Freedom Summer in 1964.



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Can you imagine what it would take now to get thousands of college students to go to a single place, and then they have to drop everything and study something?



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For weeks and weeks and weeks, and then they have to travel to states far away from them and stay there for long periods of time under threat of death.



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Basically.



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to change social norms in Mississippi in that summer.



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It's just very hard to get people's attention to even do that kind of work now, and I think that's one of our biggest challenges, is creating what, in the Civil Rights Movement, we called that tension, right? How do you come to that tension that then creates change? Tension that creates change demands attention.



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Right? Tension can only be created if you stay focused on something for a long period of time. At the moment, we don't stay focused on anything for any period of time, so how do you create the tension that's necessary for change? That's one of the biggest challenges for, I think, social justice movements at the moment, is how do you create the critical tension that's necessary?



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Dean Leonard M. Baynes: Last question.



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Pressure's on. Hold on, right.



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Question: Always good to see you, Dean Holley.



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as a former accountant turned finance attorney, you know, I have to ask, like, what are ways we can fund and finance, this, like, new civil rights lawyering movement, so we don't have situations like, Charles… Charles Hamilton Houston, and, like, you know, what ways, if we're not civil rights attorneys, what ways can we assist in the movement?



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President Danielle Holley: That's such a great question. How do we finance the civil rights movement of today, and how do we think about, if we're not practicing civil rights law every day, what can we do to help movements that are centered on justice? I think the number one thing is, if you have a civil rights cause that you believe in, whether it's the First Amendment, I'm a big



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I love the First Amendment. Whether it's the First Amendment, it's the 14th Amendment, you're concerned about equal protection, you're concerned about due process, whatever that is, find organizations that do that work, and make sure you're giving to those organizations. One of the things that's happened over the last year is we saw a dip in giving to civil rights organizations like we have not seen in the last 50 years.



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There has been a real drying up of resources towards places like



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the Legal Defense Fund, like Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, even ACLU, which has always been a fundraising powerhouse, has seen a lot of their fundraising dry up. So make sure that you're giving to causes that you believe in. Give to causes about political polarization. I love that work of defeating political polarization. We need all of that work to be done right now. So I really encourage you to give to those things.



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And then consider board service. One of the great things about being a lawyer, people are always looking for us to serve on boards because we know a lot about governance, or we have the capacity to know about governance and to help with governance issues. Consider serving on boards. I think that's the other way that you can really get involved. And a lot of times, as a corporate or finance attorney, they need you on the finance committee, right? They need you to do development work in fundraising. There is a lot of



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work to be done as lawyers that practice in other areas other than civil rights laws supporting civil rights organizations.



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Dean Leonard M. Baynes: Well, let's give President Holley a round of applause, that was great.



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And I recognize I didn't mention Daniella Landers, who's the president of the Houston Bar Association. She's the first Black woman to hold that position.



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So President Holley will be available to answer questions, but first, I would like to invite the Mount Holyoke, family to take a photo with President Hawley before she engages everybody else. So, Mount Holyoke alums who are in the audience, can you all come down?



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You've taken photos with the Howard Law School graduates too, right?



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You've taken photos of Howard Law School.



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Okay, great. So, the Mount Holyoke folks, can you come down?