Diversity Docket
How We Sparked Engaged FBA Diversity Programming By Jacqueline Johnson and Talia Sukol Karas
Jacqueline A. Johnson is the First Assistant for the Federal Public Defender Office for the Northern District of Ohio and has been a criminal defense attorney for 38 years. She lectures nationally on criminal law and diversity, equity, and inclusion issues. She chairs the FBA Northern District of Ohio Diversity Committee. Talia Sukol Karas is an Associate Attorney in Porter Wright Morris & Arthur’s Cleveland, Ohio office. She practices in the areas of white collar criminal defense, investigations, and civil defense. Talia is the immediate past chair of the FBA Northern District of Ohio Diversity Committee and currently Co-Chairs the Continuing Legal Education Committee.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020, and the national protests and public reckoning about violence against Black bodies that followed, the Northern District of Ohio Chapter of the FBA renewed the mission of our Diversity Committee. Utilizing the move to Zoom at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we held a discussion between Judge Solomon Oliver and Magistrate Judge Thomas Parker, both of the district. Judge Oliver, who served as Chief Judge from 2010–2017, spoke about his experiences beginning with his youth as a Black child in Alabama attending segregated schools. Magistrate Judge Parker had experience exploring the impact of race on one’s perspective through his involvement with his largely Caucasian church’s joint book club with a largely Black congregation. The discussion was moderated by Marisa Darden, who also shared her experiences growing up as a young Black woman in the suburbs of Cleveland. With the support of our then-chapter president, Erin Brown, this lunchtime Zoom program launched a new era in our chapter’s Diversity Committee work.
Book Club The success of the lunch hour discussion between Judge Oliver and Magistrate Judge Parker, in combination with the national conversation about race, sparked more programming. Marisa Darden chaired the committee in its first renewed year. Given Judge Parker’s experience with book clubs, we decided to launch a diversity book club open to our membership—including judges and practicing lawyers—that has continued to present. Given the national conversation, it was helpful for us to process the history of race that brought us to present day in the United States with our colleagues in the legal community, with whom we shared certain ways of thinking. With the pandemic still in its early months, our members were also looking for opportunities to connect in meaningful ways over Zoom, and the book club supported this need. In the past three years, our selections have included Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom, An American Sunrise: Poems by Joy Harjo,
12 • THE FEDERAL LAWYER • Summer 2023
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, and The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein. The success of our book club dovetailed with the availability of national FBA Diversity Grants, and our chapter was awarded funds that we used to bring Northwestern University professor of history Kate Masur in for a day of programming in Cleveland during autumn 2021. Book club members read Dr. Masur’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated book, Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction, and participated in a special book club roundtable with Dr. Masur over lunch. Dr. Masur led the discussion, highlighting early forms of segregation that followed the end of slavery. An early form of Jim Crow, so-called “Black Laws,” intersected with “Poor Laws” that targeted single mothers, individuals with disabilities, and people of color, generally. Following lunch, our chapter hosted a panel discussion featuring Dr. Masur and Judge Oliver in conversation about the history of racism, from the country’s birth to present. Though laws today may no longer be explicitly racist, the discussion recognized that a deep implicit racism continues to run through our legal structure.
Outreach More recently, we launched an affinity bar outreach initiative. Our first program in this effort was an African American History month program highlighting still-practicing 96-year-old federal litigator James R. Willis. We partnered with the Norman S. Minor Bar Association (NSMBA), the local African American bar association, to host an in-person seminar and reception. Judge Dan Polster generously hosted the program in his courtroom. The two-hour event gave both bar associations an opportunity to honor a local African American attorney who has argued twice before the U.S. Supreme Court. Following a color guard presentation, Willis spoke of his strategies in preparing for oral arguments and how his service as a U.S. Marine in the first all-Black regiment trained at Montfort Point in North Carolina spurred him on to excellence continued on page 14