White courtrooms decried

The president of the American Bar Association is an African-American. So is the president-elect and the two highest officers below them. Still, says ABA president Dennis W. Archer, lawyers of color are "woefully underrepresented" in America's legal system.

Archer, who also served as mayor of Detroit for two terms, spoke as part of the University of Utah's Black Awareness month, which is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. That 1954 civil rights Supreme Court decision was momentous, Archer said, but it has hardly brought complete justice for blacks in education and beyond.

Although people of color now account for 30 percent of America's population, Archer noted, lawyers of color make up only 10 percent of the country's attorneys. "When a person of color walks into a courtroom and sees no one of color — among the lawyers and judges — they wonder if they will get a fair shake," Archer said.

It wasn't until 1948 that the ABA admitted black lawyers. Had they been allowed in sooner, he said, "the discussion of race would have been so much farther advanced."

Brown v. Board ruled that segregation in American's public school classrooms was unconstitutional, overruling a previous decision by saying "separate" was not "equal." But the spirit of that decision — making educational opportunities truly equal — has required affirmative action policies, Archer said. He applauded last summer's Supreme Court decision ruling that the University of Michigan law school's admissions policies should be allowed to take race into account.

Such affirmative action admissions policies have "profound implications" for the future of his profession, he said.

"There will always be some of us that succeed. But that's not good enough," he told his audience. He encouraged them to make their own homes and communities fertile for learning.

Archer, who grew up in Michigan, said that any tendency he had to disregard school was circumvented by his mother — who always showed up at PTA meetings expecting to see gold stars next to his name — and by neighbors who would stop him on the way home from school to check his report card.

"We need to have that same kind of community concern with education" now, he told his audience. "We have to take time with our children" and remind children that, as his mother told him, "teachers are always right."

The real leader in embracing diversity, Archer said, is corporate America, which has realized that if it wants to reach the world's non-white populations it must direct its marketing and products to them. By 2056, he said, it is projected that the majority of Americans will be black, Latino, Asian or other people of color.

Archer's keynote address drew only about 50 people to the U.'s Olpin Union ballroom, although chairs had optimistically been set out for hundreds. A panel discussion earlier in the week about the educational significance of Brown v. Board also drew only a small audience.

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