'Do they really give a damn?' Leah Ward Sears is tired of talking about this
By Samantha Joseph January 12, 2021 at 01:20 PM
Former Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears has been wedged into advocacy for her entire race and gender, while her white male colleagues are invited to spotlight their professional expertise.
Former Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears, partner at Smith, Gambrell & Russell. (Courtesy photo)
She’s not the one.
Don’t ask retired Justice Leah Ward Sears to discuss America’s racism, reflected in the lack of diversity in Big Law.
At 65, she’s been talking about it for decades and has had enough.
“Maybe it’s time to ask white lawyers—Big Law lawyers—about that. I don’t want to spend my entire career talking to white people about diversity, who don’t want to hear it,” said Sears, former chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court. “Nobody asks them what they’re going to do. All the Blacks are always lined up and asked about diversity. But we’ve been talking about it for years, and the needle doesn’t move. So maybe it’s time for all the whites to be lined up. And asked what they’re going to do, and do they really give them a damn—honestly.”
‘Buy some books’
Two days following the Jan. 6 riots on Capitol Hill, Sears acknowledged she was “testy.”
A mob had stormed the U.S. Capitol to falsely claim that election fraud had cheated President Donald Trump out of a second term in office.
Pro-Trump rioters seen on and around Capitol building. (Credit:lev radin/Shutterstock.com)
Some had carried racist symbols, including Confederate flags, while others had a noose hung from a gallows.
“Good-meaning whites, … buy some books. It’s really on you to fix it. … You can’t ask someone else, ‘If I have a problem, what do I have to do fix it?’ You have to fix it. The problem is beyond me. It’s in you,” Sears said. “I’ll help you as much as I can, but I’m getting weary of carrying the burden of being in Big Law and then having to educate people who don’t seem interested.”
The events of Jan. 6 sparked comparison of law enforcement’s response a few months earlier, when the National Guard’s tear gas and assault rifles had greeted peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters.
Unlike protestors holding peaceful marches in Washington, D.C., against police killings of unarmed Black people, the Capitol Hill rioters had looted national symbols, stolen electronics, broken windows, toppled furniture, vandalized the offices of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other lawmakers and reportedly smeared feces on the walls.
And then police had escorted them out of the building.
A seemingly shocked nation was abuzz, but not Sears, who has spent decades talking about racial inequality.
“I’ve given this interview hundreds of times,” she said. “My whole life is punctuated with conversations about diversity: white publications asking Black lawyers what to do about diversity and then doing nothing about it. Because if they had, we wouldn’t still be having these conversations.”
Retired Justice Leah Ward Sears
“My whole life is punctuated with conversations about diversity.”
Sears is a partner at Am Law 200 firm Smith, Gambrell & Russell in Atlanta, where she tackles complex matters in her appellate, arbitration, mediation and trial practices.
The retired justice is a member of the firm’s executive committee, as well as its business litigation and appellate practices—but not its diversity committee.
“I’m an appellate lawyer. I’m a fantastic appellate lawyer, but I’m asked to be on three diversity panels a week … never an appellate panel,” she said. “I’ve spent half my life dealing with diversity and inclusion issues, and it hasn’t been fair. Little has changed.”
Meanwhile, her white male colleagues are invited to spotlight their professional expertise, while Sears has been wedged into advocacy for her entire race and gender.
“I spent my youth going to little white girls’ schools, explaining why my hair is curly, … why my skin is brown. It’s humiliating actually,” she said. “It hurts my heart. It clouds my brain. I want to be thought of as a lawyer—not a Black lawyer, not a woman lawyer. I don’t want to be a lawyer with an asterisk, a judge with an asterisk.”
‘Really change’
With an Ivy League education, an initial rise to the bench at 27, and her first victory before the state supreme court by age 36, Sears outworked her peers, over-credentialed herself with J.D. and LLM degrees, and crafted a distinguished career as an attorney, jurist and elected official.
She was the first Black woman to rise to the Fulton County Superior Court bench and the first woman and youngest justice to serve on the Georgia Supreme Court. In retaining that seat, Sears also became the first woman to win a contested statewide election in Georgia. She was the first Black woman to serve as chief justice in the country. And along the way, she also founded and served as the first president of the Georgia Association of Black Women Attorneys.
Plus, Sears was twice shortlisted among potential nominees for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.
But none of that insulated her from racism in the American South.
While serving on Georgia’s highest court, a lawyer’s wife at a reception had assumed she was the help, and had instructed the top jurist on how to refill drink glasses.
It’s the sort of blind obtuseness that erects barriers for Black attorneys.
“I had to work very very hard,” Sears said. “Blacks don’t get the benefit of the doubt. Women don’t get the benefit of the doubt. … You’ve got to work three times as hard.”
As a young attorney attending a business luncheon at a private club in Atlanta, a white woman had mistaken her for a restroom attendant.
And years later, as chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, Sears had been walking at a resort with her children when a white woman had stopped to ask for directions. “Hey girl, where’s the spa?” the woman had asked, Sears recalled in an article in the Wall Street Journal.
Her children had been embarrassed.
“I don’t need a crown for being the first and the only. I just want things to change—really, really change,” Sears said Friday. “I love my country. I really do. But I want my country to be better, and it’s not right now. It hasn’t been. It hasn’t been for me. Even though I am loyal and I love my country, it’s created a lot of grief.”
‘Beyond talk’
But now, perhaps a glimmer of hope in the wake of the attack on the nation’s capital.
Sears said she was shocked and encouraged by President-elect Joe Biden’s remarks after the riots—the first time she had heard a U.S. commander-in-chief acknowledge the difference in policing of Blacks and whites.
“No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol,” Biden said on Jan. 7. “We all know that’s true. And it is unacceptable. Totally unacceptable. The American people saw it in plain view.”
Sears hopes this might be a turning point—a public acknowledgment of systemic racism that spawns white privilege and disparate economic opportunities that permeate every aspect of society, including the legal system.
“[Biden] seems to understand justice, and where race is in the country, how far we have to go, and maybe even how to get there,” she said. “I think what’s going to happen is a new generation is going to rise, taught by younger people, who have been trained differently, who have … less bias. And in time, it will dissipate. … It’s not going to disappear overnight. But make bold moves. … It’s an action. We’re beyond talk now.”
Samantha Joseph is co-head of the Litigation Desk in ALM’s global newsroom. Grad school: Newhouse Syracuse. Contact: sjoseph@alm.com. On Twitter: @SjosephWriter
