Thank you, Dean Newton, for the invitation and opportunity to join you here at the University of Miami School of Law. It is an honor to serve as this year’s speaker for the Becker Poliakoff Preeminent Lectures.
Being here on this beautiful campus in Coral Gables, in this lecture hall, after two years of meetings on Zoom screens, feels celebratory. It also brings back memories of my time as a law student.
No doubt many of you have your own recent or more distant memories of classes, clinics or professors. Children and Youth Advocacy Clinic, the Health Rights Clinic, the Environmental Justice Clinic, the Human Rights Clinic, Tenants Rights Clinic, Innocence Clinic which has secured some major victories over the past few years. The Historic Black Church Project which has been driving suits around environmental justice. The Hope Public Interest Initiative which helps bring social justice driven students to the law school. The Civil Rights Law Practicum where are addressing issues like online bullying and harassment. Criminal Civil Rights Investigation and Prosecution course where students are learning about hate crimes and police misconduct cases. The Public Interest Law in the Private Practice where students got to work with law firms on systematic litigation. And then there are a host of amazing student-led organizations like Miami Law Women and their work to advance gender justice and Outlaws that are addressing LGBTQ issues right here in the city. These experiences have given you a glimpse into lawyering and a sense of the power of the law outside the classroom.
For me, one of those moments came with a class that focused on “civil rights lawyering” with Professor Ted Shaw.
Some of you may know of Ted Shaw as a great civil rights attorney from his work at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He worked there for over 26 years, litigating cases related to elementary, secondary and higher education, housing, voting rights and capital punishment and directed LDF’s education docket. He also taught civil procedure and other classes at Columbia Law School, where I was a student. His civil rights lawyering class brought the law to life.
I had known for a long time that I wanted to be a civil rights lawyer. I remember a field trip in high school where we visited a courtroom and sat in on a hearing concerning school desegregation in Hartford, Connecticut. As a young Black student, I was in awe of the powerful legal advocacy and compelling arguments being made for racially integrated schools. Years later, in this civil rights lawyering class, Professor Shaw would tell war stories of his cases, describing his work in the trenches as an LDF lawyer traveling all over the country in pursuit of justice. I was inspired and intrigued by his accounts and his dedication. Like me, he had gone to Columbia Law School. And he had started his career as a trial attorney in the honors program of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division – something to which I also aspired. His class and his war stories gave me a context from which to start truly reflecting on the power of the law. These lessons have remained with me throughout my career.
I have been at the helm of the Civil Rights Division since last May, and, let me tell you, it has been an exciting and productive year at the Division. Before I talk about some of the critical work that we have done recently, especially in the areas of racial and gender justice, I’d like to start by discussing a piece of civil rights history from right here in Florida. Florida was home to some of the civil rights movement’s most pioneering activists, such as Mary McLeod Bethune and James Weldon Johnson, and the struggle for civil rights remains an important part of this state’s history. In 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to St. Augustine to protest segregation — during that summer of ‘64, it was a major battleground leading up to the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
As with so much history related to civil rights, this particular case is not one with a happy ending. It is a case that Florida’s Legislature in 2017 has called “a shameful chapter in this state’s history.” Supreme Court Justice Jackson referred to the case as “one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.” A criminal case that brought Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to Florida.
Maybe some of you have heard of the case of the “Groveland Four” – four young Black men identified and accused of having raped a young white woman in 1949, in Jim Crow-era Florida. The case is full tragedy: there were doubts about Norma Padgett’s testimony from the outset, but in the era of Jim Crow, one of the accused never even made it to a courtroom. Ernest Thomas was hunted down and shot to death by a mob of about 1000 men – his body was riddled with over 400 bullets. A jury quickly convicted all three surviving defendants despite evidence presented at trial that none of the three men were nearby at the time of the crime. The youngest, Charles Greenlee, was 16 years old and received a life sentence. The other two defendants, Samuel Shepard and Walter Irwin, were 22, and received death sentences.
Enter Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Thurgood Marshall, known at the time as “Mr. Civil Rights,” represented the two capital defendants on appeal, and in a 1951 per curiam opinion for all nine justices, the Supreme Court overturned their convictions and returned the case to the state for a retrial. In a concurring opinion, Justice Jackson pointed to “prejudicial influences outside the courtroom” and noted that “the conclusion [was] inescapable that these defendants were prejudged as guilty, and the trial was but a legal gesture to register a verdict already dictated by the press and the public opinion which it generated.”
This was only the beginning of a lengthy and complicated legal saga, which I can only give you a short glimpse into today. Even after that resounding victory, justice was not easy to come by for the accused men. While Shepard and Irwin were being transported from state prison to the local jail for a hearing after their convictions were overturned by the Supreme Court, they were shot by the local Lake County sheriff, Willis McCall. Shepard died on the side of the road, but Irwin survived. Despite testimony from Irwin, Sheriff McCall was acquitted for the shooting of the Shepard and Irwin, and Irwin was again convicted on retrial and again sentenced to death.
Sheriff Willis McCall would be repeatedly re-elected, serving as sheriff until 1972, and was never convicted for multiple violent incidents against Black men. His prejudice extended beyond how he treated criminal defendants: the Orlando Sentinel noted that he “kept the trappings of segregation long after the rest of the South had integrated,” and it wasn’t until 1971, when the Nixon administration stepped in and sued to integrate the Lake County Jail, that Lake County’s restrooms removed the “colored” and “white” signs. He lived a long life in retirement before his death in 1994.
Marshall’s legal advocacy, though not enough to sway the jury on retrial, stuck with the state prosecutor, and gnawed at him. Eventually Irwin’s death sentence was commuted by Governor Collins when he took office in 1954, and Irwin was released from prison in 1968.
Many years later, in 2017, the Florida state legislature passed a resolution formally apologizing to the families of the Groveland Four for “gross injustices.” Norma Padgett continued to stand by her accusations, but in 2019, Governor DeSantis pardoned all four of the defendants, remarking that the “ideals of justice” were “perverted, time and time again,” in this case. At the same time, the Orlando Sentinel also apologized that its news coverage of the case “lent credibility to the cover-up and to the official, racist narrative.” And finally, just this past November, a judge exonerated them, vacating the convictions of Greenlee and Irvin, and dismissing Thomas and Shepard’s indictments.
And despite these significant changes and necessary steps to acknowledge injustice, we know that some of individual harms cannot be repaired. Two lives were lost to murder and vigilantism. The survivors, Irwin and Greenlee, spent much of their lives wrongfully incarcerated.
It is hard to read about, or talk about, moments in our history like this. They are painful reminders of bias and hate-motivated crimes committed by law enforcement and then facilitated by the justice system and the electorate. But they also show what thoughtful, determined legal advocacy can do. It can convince the Supreme Court to overturn convictions from the Jim Crow south in 1951. It can stand up to law enforcement when a sheriff and his office are not serving the interests of justice or upholding the constitution. This determination remains critical today, as it was back then.
It is striking, when you reflect on such a tragic part of our recent past, that at that time, the Civil Rights Division that I now oversee did not yet exist. Created as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the Division is nearly 65 years old and was borne of the activism and organization of the early Civil Rights Movement. We now have incredibly powerful civil rights laws to use as tools to fight against racism and other forms of harmful discrimination. It doesn’t mean there is less to work to do, but it does mean we are better equipped to meet these challenges.
And of course, this is but one example from Florida’s long civil rights history. There are many key civil rights struggles to make real the promise of equality in this state: embattled efforts to desegregate schools, “wade-ins” at swimming pools and beaches, campaigns of bus boycotts and lunch counter sit-ins. Many of these efforts were led by students and young people. Students like Patricia and Priscilla Stephens, Florida A&M students who were lead organizers with the Tallahassee Congress of Racial Equality (known as “CORE”). Using strategies they learned at a CORE workshop here in Miami, they organized a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Tallahassee in 1960. They were arrested for disturbing the peace. Rather than pay their fines, eight of these students chose jail time. Patricia wrote a letter from prison about her experience. Her letter reached civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jackie Robinson. And King wrote a telegram back: praising their “determined courage” and “righteous protest.” He concluded with the recognition that “you bring all of America nearer the threshold of the world’s bright tomorrows.” Students and young people here in Florida stepped up. They sharpened our sense of what was at stake, formed the focal point of so much of this nation’s important history, and drove so much positive change in the direction of that horizon “of the world’s bright tomorrows.” We still seek that threshold. We continue to work to get closer.
A career devoted to civil rights work means you take stock of victories that push us towards a more equitable society – the successful prosecutions of hate crimes and unconstitutional policing, the systemic investigations and resolutions against police departments, landlords, employers, banks, and more – but you also notice the gaps, the spaces that still need to be filled in. We can be grateful, but far from satisfied, that McCall is no longer sheriff of Lake County, for there is much work to do to confront the problems of bias in policing and in the criminal justice system and to uphold laws that protect the rights of all to participate fully in our civic and social life.
So now I’d like to talk about some of the major ways that today’s Civil Rights Division is continuing the fight for racial justice and equity.
From the account of the Groveland four, and the central, awful role that a sheriff’s office played in that tragedy, it’s probably easiest to draw a connection to our policing work. Indeed, our work upholding constitutional and lawful policing practices, and our work investigating and prosecuting individual law enforcement officers who violate individuals’ rights, is a central focus for the Division, and for me.
Where there is evidence of systemic violations of civil rights laws, we have powerful tools available to address patterns of misconduct. These investigations are known as “pattern or practice investigations,” and they reflect a unique and critically important authority vested in the Department of Justice to examine and investigate, and, where appropriate, enforce key civil rights statutes to ensure constitutional policing. In the last year, the department opened pattern or practice investigations of the police departments in Louisville, Minneapolis, Phoenix and Mount Vernon, New York, including investigating whether these departments engage in discriminatory policing. That work is ongoing. As you can tell from the geographic locations of these open policing investigations: this work is necessary and keeps the Division busy in jurisdictions across the nation.
Racial justice also requires that the people are able to trust the individual police and law enforcement agents who serve them. That is why the Civil Rights Division has worked to hold individual police officers accountable for misconduct. In the past year, we secured convictions of four former Minneapolis police officers for federal civil rights violations in the death of George Floyd. George Floyd’s killing, and how to hold the offenders to account, has captured our nation’s psyche since May 2020. Those convictions sent a clear message to police departments across the country that they must use only reasonable force and that individual officers have a proactive duty to protect the constitutional rights of all Americans.
We also have a significant role to play in the prosecution of hate crimes. We recently secured guilty verdicts on hate crime charges against the three men who killed Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, another nationally recognized case involving racism and violence. The evidence at trial revealed that the defendants had strongly held racist beliefs that led them to make assumptions and decisions about Mr. Arbery because he was a Black man. For instance, the evidence showed that one defendant had referred to his daughter’s Black boyfriend as a “monkey” and used the “n-word,” that a second had made deeply racist comments, including that he wished that Julian Bond, a prominent Black civil rights leader, “had been put in the ground years ago,” and that “those Blacks are nothing but trouble,” and that the third had expressed on social media and in text messages that he associated Black people with criminality and wanted to see them harmed or killed.
Ahmaud Arbery’s killin
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