By Katheryn Hayes Tucker
Daily Report
November 9, 2016
As leaders of the state's largest
African-American lawyers' groups, Holland & Knight partner Charles Johnson
III and AT&T in-house counsel Suzanne Ockleberry have been working for
decades to increase diversity in judicial elections and appointments. But a few
years ago, they began to see crucial gains being lost. African-American judges
in Atlanta and other cities were retiring and being replaced with whites. Some
cities had never had an African-American judge.
They started Advocacy for Action in 2013. This
year, they've begun to reverse the trend with elections and appointments of
diverse judges in different courts around the state.
Johnson, former president of the Gate City Bar
Association, and Ockleberry, former president of the Georgia Association of
Black Women Attorneys, brought luminaries from both groups together to take
action. Their first step was to talk.
They put their concerns and their case into a
letter—four pages single spaced—which the Daily Report published in 2012. They
gave it the headline: "Will the last African-American judge please turn
out the lights?"
They called it a crisis that fed on silence and
apathy. "The idea that the judiciary should reflect the best and brightest
legal minds, regardless of race, will be a quaint bygone idea," they
wrote. They quoted Frederick Douglass: "Power concedes nothing without a
demand."
They issued a call to action. "The question
we must ask is what can we do, personally and as a community. The answer is we
must speak."
And speak they did—to community groups,
continuing legal education events, panel discussions and on social media. They
made their research and statistics available on their own website. They began a
targeted campaign to make people aware of the importance of electing
representative judges. They recorded videos and posted them on YouTube. They
encouraged sitting judges to stay in office long enough to open their seats in
an election, rather than allowing a governor to appoint a replacement. In some
instances, they targeted incumbents with opposition for re-election. They
helped fund campaigns through a political action committee and a private
corporation that could accept anonymous donations. They learned that plenty of
lawyers would gladly give up the tax deduction in exchange for not having to
publicly oppose a sitting judge. They recruited qualified minority lawyers to
seek judicial office either through election or appointment. And they
communicated with decision-makers to ensure that qualified diverse candidates
were included in consideration for appointments.
The process has not been easy. Last year, lawyers
involved with the group sued Gov. Nathan Deal to block his naming of three
white judges to fill three new positions on the Georgia Court of Appeals. They
lost. But they made their point nonetheless. This year, the governor named an
African-American judge to that court.
Last year, the group successfully lobbied the
Cobb County Superior Court for the appointment of an African-American woman as
chief magistrate judge. They backed an African-American woman appointed by the
governor to fill an open seat in Macon. And in this year's elections, Fulton
County Superior Court gained its first new African-American judges in many
years.
They measure their success in tiny increments.
"Every once in a while, I think we are
heard," said Johnson. "There is some heightened awareness of the
importance of voting, and of becoming informed about candidates. There is less
of a tendency to ignore these races. We've had something to do with that."
This work is not part of their day jobs,
Ockleberry noted. "We do this because we believe in our heart of hearts in
the mission of this organization," she said. "A more representative
and accountable judiciary is what we're seeking."
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