Racial prejudices inspire attorney to fight for rights

Two unarmed black teens were about to enter a fight with a white man when the man pulled out a shotgun. The two teens wrestled the gun from the man’s hands and ran away. Though the white man was uninjured, the two teens were charged with assault and theft of a gun. This is the kind of case that motivated Ronald Sullivan, distinguished attorney and professor at Harvard Law School, to fight for minority rights.

At the inaugural lecture in the Thurgood Marshall Lecture series, entitled “Criminal Justice Today: The Intersection between Race and the American Criminal Justice System,” Sullivan said that unjust cases of discrimination against minorities drove him to dedicate his life to public service.

“We encounter the legal system as a flesh-and-blood legal system, made up of humans,” Sullivan said in Dodds Auditorium before an audience of a few dozen, most of whom were students. “Justice, in my view, is something that people make happen, justice means that we do, that we act, that we remain ever vigilant even in an un-level landscape,” he said.

Sullivan said he believed the American legal system is better than those of countries like China, where the state dominates all and is unwilling to change. He added that America still has “a long, long way to go” to achieve equality.

Though Sullivan criticized certain aspects of the American legal system, his tone was uplifting. Some audience members were struck by the hopeful light he cast on the future. “A lot of people have a negative view on [the system], but he opened my eyes to some of the different perspectives you can have,” Noelle Vinson ’10 said after the lecture.

The lecture series was in honor of Thurgood Marshall, whose life in public service parallels Sullivan’s own career in many ways.

Marshall was the first African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court and is remembered for his victory as a lawyer in the Brown v. Board of Education case, which found that separate educational institutions for blacks and whites were inherently unequal.

“Thurgood Marshall is a personal hero of mine,” Sullivan said. “The only way to properly describe [him] is as a servant of justice, someone who serves the interests of others in need.”

Support nonprofit student journalism. Donate to the ‘Prince’. Donate now »

After spending many years as a public defender in the District of Columbia, Sullivan was appointed as director of the U.S. Public Defender Service, where he testified before Congress on many important criminal issues and emphasized the importance of race in many cases.

“Regrettably, less and less people are going into public service,” Sullivan said. “It is a personal decision, and I never tell people to do this or that, but don’t be blind-less in the pursuit of money; the money will come if you are good at what you do.”

Jasmine Evans ’10, the organizer of the event and a member of the National Black Law Students Association, said the lecture shed a different light on the nature of justice.

“Justice is an action; it is something that you do,” she said.