My life

Although the University of Arkansas law school’s first black students had entered twenty-five years earlier, it was not until the early seventies that a substantial number of them finally began to enter state law schools across the South. Many were not well prepared, especially those whose education had been confined to poor segregated schools. About twenty black students took my courses between 1973 and 1976, and I got to know the others. Almost all of them were working very hard. They wanted to succeed, and several of them lived under enormous emotional pressure because they were afraid they couldn’t make it. Sometimes their fears were justified. I’ll never forget reading one black student’s exam paper with a mixture of disbelief and anger. I knew he had studied like a demon and understood the material, but his exam didn’t show it. The right answers were in there, but finding them required digging through piles of misspelled words, bad grammar, and poor sentence construction. An A’s worth of knowledge was hidden in the bushes of an F presenta-tion, flawed by things he hadn’t learned going all the way back to elementary school. I gave him a B-, corrected the grammar and spelling, and decided to set up tutoring sessions to help transform the black students’ hard work and native intelligence into better results. I think they helped, both substantively and psychologically, though several of the students continued to struggle with their writing skills and with the emotional burden of having one foot through the door of opportunity and the other held back by the heavy weight of past segregation. When many of those students went on to distinguished careers as lawyers and judges, the clients they represented and the parties they judged probably had no idea how high a mountain they had had to climb to reach the bar or the bench. When the Supreme Court upheld the principle of affirmative action in 2003, I thought of my black students, of how hard they worked and all they had to overcome. They gave me all the evidence I’d ever need to support the Court’s ruling.