“What a phenomenal opportunity to have this conference in St. Louis, Missouri – in the heart of the new Civil Rights Movement!” said Pamela Meanes.
Meanes, a partner at Thompson Coburn and president of the National Bar Association, was speaking of the association’s 35th annual Midyear Conference, which will be held here March 26-29. While the association will conduct some of its internal business and bestow awards, it’s “unfinished business” in the community that Meanes wants to discuss.
In fact, she titled her Presidential Showcase (scheduled for 8-11 a.m. Saturday, March 28) as “The Unfinished Business of Charles Hamilton Houston: Ferguson – Where Do We Go from Here?”
“Charles Hamilton Houston said African-American lawyers are either social engineers or parasites on society,” Meanes said.
Houston (1895–1950) was the dean of Howard Law School who trained Thurgood Marshall and a legal activist who helped to dismantle Jim Crow laws and set the stage for the legal victories of the Civil Rights Movement.
Are lawyers social engineers or parasites on society? It is a key question to ask at a time when some advocate attorneys are working to reform municipal courts in St. Louis County – many of them staffed by black attorneys serving the predatory system as prosecutors and judges.
“If prosecutors and judges in municipal courts are implementing law at the level we saw in the Department of Justice report on Ferguson, they need to be terminated,” Meanes said. “The judge works for the people.”
Will Meanes challenge the attorneys who attend the conference to get involved in municipal court reform?
“We have to change and reform the law,” Meanes said. “There are so many pieces to how change has to come. Everybody has their piece of the puzzle. As lawyers, our segment is to oversee that there is leadership in truth and justice. We refuse to be quiet until change happens.”
That said, she did not find the DOJ report on Ferguson shocking. Neither was she surprised when a St. Louis County Grand Jury and the DOJ both declined to bring charges against then Police Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown Jr. on August 9.
“The National Bar Association has said since July and before that the law is broken,” Meanes said. “The standards by which measure whether a police killing is justified are arbitrary and capricious. We advocate changes in the law at the federal level and the state level.”
The dual release of the two DOJ reports on March 4 – one indicting the Ferguson Police Department, the other absolving a Ferguson police officer who shot an unarmed teen six times, twice in the head – gave new life and justification to the protest movement, she said.
“The Justice Department reports are really an example of where the community’s frustration comes from,” Meanes said. “One report says there is a systemic pattern of racism in the department. Another report says Darren Wilson acted, without bias, in self-defense. How do we marry those two reports? People don’t think they can get justice in the streets or in the court room. We’re left to fend on our own.”
That is why Meanes is sharing the spotlight of her Presidential Showcase with young people who have been active in the protest movement, including Carlos Ball, Ayanna Delaine, John Gaskin III, Anita Jones Mack and Bishop Derrick Robinson.
“I made them a part of my showcase,” Meanes said. “I am giving them a platform. They are very much on point.”
Meanes thinks that the members of her professional association stand to learn from these young voices.
“This is an opportunity to say to the lawyers who come here, ‘This is our own. We are not ashamed of them. They did something we could not do: They turned police brutality from a moment to a movement. And it’s not going away.’”
The National Bar Association is hosting its 35th annual Midyear Conference March 26-29 at the Renaissance Hotel Downtown St. Louis. Visit nationalbar.org.
