Page 59 - ACTL Journal Win24

FELLOW JEFFERY ROBINSON ENDED HIS PRESENTATION TO THE CROWD OF FELLOWS IN SAN DIEGO ABOUT THE WHO WE ARE PROJECT WITH THIS SENTIMENT:
I actually believe that when people of good faith are confronted with truth- ful information - that may make them uncomfortable, they may have to wrestle with it - but at some point, they will be open to doing something different. I love this country enough to criticize it when it is wrong.
And a core mission of The Who We Are Project is just that: to educate Amer- icans about what is, fundamentally, a lost strand of our history and provide truthful information about anti-Black racism and its impacts on the building of this nation.
So how does an experienced trial lawyer move from his career in private prac- tice and then as a Deputy Legal Director at the ACLU to become a founder of a non-profit creating original content – including an award winning feature length documentary – to educate on anti-Black racism? It is not a single turn- ing point moment from Jeff’s life, but the effects of a number of key moments, personal moments, reaching back to Jeff’s childhood.
Jeff grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, as the child of civil rights leaders, in the years leading up to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. As he re- called: “I didn’t grow up reading about the civil rights movement, it was what I walked out my front door into as I was living my life as a child.” Education was a key value for Jeff and his family: he and his brother integrated a Mem- phis Catholic elementary school and Jeff went on to receive one of the best educations our country can offer, going to college at Marquette University and then earning his law degree from Harvard Law School. He went on to a remarkable legal career, serving as a state public defender, a federal public defender, one of the original members of the John Adams Project representing Guantanamo detainees, a partner at a Seattle law firm, and a Deputy Legal Director with the ACLU.
Yet in 2011 something changed in Jeff’s life. Jeff became the father of his thir- teen-year old nephew who had come to live with Jeff and his wife after a death in the family. Jeff was suddenly confronted with a reality faced by Black fami- lies across the country: the struggle about what to tell his son about racism in America. And he did what trial lawyers are accustomed to doing: he began to dig into the facts. As he did, he began to learn surprising facts – new to him – about the history of anti-Black racism continuing after the 13th Amendment and its impact on America; facts that he had never been taught despite his educational pedigree, family interest, and personal history in the subject.
Jeff was blunt with the San Diego audience about his reaction: he was angry. He was angry with himself, with his teachers, with the schools and univer- sities that had failed him. But when he stopped to consider, he realized the core problem: how can we expect teachers to pass along knowledge to their students when they themselves were never exposed to the information?
With the problem becoming clear, Jeff got to work. He began to do presen- tations across the country on this lost history. Those presentations resonated.
WINTER 2024 JOURNAL 58