The day I write this is the ninth anniversary of the day I think this story began – the day we shut down the highway in July 1999. That day I officially crossed the line from being an attorney – i.e., on the sidelines advising my client/protestors, arranging for their bail, and litigating against MODOT – to being, I suppose, a “leader” in our community. With that came a responsibility beyond my law practice that I neither could nor desired to escape.
Within a couple months of that, the Counsel for the Supreme Court, who administers the discipline against lawyers, brought an action to suspend my law license for a year based on complaints filed by six different clients whose cases covered a span of several years. In doing so, the Supreme Court Counsel was rejecting the recommendation of the three-person panel consisting of two lawyers and one layperson, which had recommended a 30-day suspension.
In accordance with the bar rules, that panel, after conducting a week-long hearing, with witnesses and testimony on the record, concluded that none of the six client complaints by themselves warranted disciplinary action, but that they collectively showed a pattern of my not being diligent, and that (coupled with the fact that I had a prior disciplinary reprimand for criticizing a judge) warranted, in their view, 30-day suspension.
I was advised by my lawyer to just take the 30-day hit and move on, which I reluctantly advised the bar I would do. Then the Supreme Court Counsel raised the ante, seeking a one-year suspension, while noting in his brief to the Supreme Court my high-profile litigation practice.
All this was going on while the highway shutdown and its aftermath were still in the news and consciousness of the community – which, of course, caused much speculation about whether there were political motives at work against me. In November, the Supreme Court handed down a 90-day suspension.
Then I learned that the kicker was that I couldn’t just resume practicing after 90 days, I had to re-apply. And that my re-application would have to go through the Supreme Court Counsel – the same guy who was going after me for a one-year suspension – and that there were no time constraints on him reviewing my re-application. I didn’t realize then that it would be nine years before I would be reinstated.
When I realized that I was confronting that Catch-22 with the bar, that’s when I knew that it was time for me to not think anymore about practicing law, but to instead devote myself full-time to “the cause.” My sustenance, I knew, would have to come from Allah.
Clash and synthesis
The past eight years have been the clash and synthesis of noble intentions with the material reality of life.
A few months after the suspension, in February of 2000, I decided to run for the congressional seat long held by Bill Clay. I got creamed. But from the congressional campaign came a lasting ally and comrade – Jamilah Nasheed.
My campaign was her first foray into elective politics. She wasn’t the least intimidated by the vaunted Clay machine, and she had no patience for naysayers or idealistic activists. She saw herself as a Muslim supporting another Muslim.
A month after the August election defeat, I hit an even more difficult low point – being evicted from my law office in U.City. It was a funny feeling, looking at all that I had accumulated over almost 20 years of practicing law being dumped out on the street. My only thought was that I did not want my son, who would come by the office in the afternoons after getting out of elementary school, to see that sight.
I began operating out of an office in North St. Louis that belonged to the Coalition for North St. Louis Economic Development (CNSLED), an organization we had created in 1999 to oversee the commitment we had obtained from Firstar Bank to invest $100 million in North St. Louis over a five-year period, with $50 million to go for business development and $50 million for home mortgages.
The commitment from Firstar had its roots in our 1996 Wall Street protest, when we chartered a TWA jet and flew 150 protestors – mostly from homeless shelters – from St. Louis to New York, where we held a demonstration on Wall Street against then-Atlanta-based Nations Bank because of its refusal to make financial commitments to the black community as part of its merger with St. Louis’ Boatmen’s Bank.
No concessions came from Nations Bank. But three years later, when Firstar Bank of Cincinnati announced its merger plans with St. Louis’ Mercantile Bank, we were very much on their radar screen.
In 2000 and 2001, CNSLED sponsored and conducted a series of classes to teach and train minority entrepreneurs about business and get them certified for loans from Firstar. Symbolically, we held the classes at the same church we used for the rallies for the I-70 protest – All Saints – and we matriculated about 100 black aspiring entrepreneurs.
In 2001, while serving as the executive director of CNSLED, I agreed to an 18-month suspension of my law license based on the avalanche of complaints from clients that ensued following all the publicity surrounding the initial suspension. I was told by a client that the bar was soliciting my clients to file complaints against me. The bar came at me so overwhelmingly that my attorney, Don Wolff, thought the best thing to do was to cop a plea; so I agreed to 18 months.
In March 2003, Metro was in the process of building the Metro Link extension and I was alerted to the fact that they had little inclusion on the project. The campaign against Metro was commenced by an organization that Jamilah, Percy Green and I created called the Concerned Citizens Coalition. After going to jail for sitting on the tracks to block the trains, that summer Metro signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) agreeing to our terms, which included Metro having separate goals for minorities and women, and breaking the work up into smaller bid packages.
In the spring of 2005 our campaign against the Illinois Department of Transportation began, which culminated in IDOT signing that summer a MOU with the Metro East Black Contractors Organization. Among other things, IDOT committed $2 million to establish a construction training program modeled after the St. Louis construction prep center that was established as part of the 1999 I-70 shutdown protest.
On the heels of the success of the IDOT campaign, in the winter of 2005, we formed the Minority Inclusion Alliance and launched the Rosa Parks Economic Initiative, targeting for minority inclusion 11 different construction projects in the metro area totaling over $3.5 billion. That initiative continues to this day.
In the course of these past nine years I’ve experienced some tough personal times, including having my home foreclosed on and surgery for colon cancer. But I’ve also had a daughter graduate from college, a son enter his second year of college, and I’ve become a smiling grandpapa. I would be remiss if I did not mention one of my happiest and proudest moments during this period – Jamilah getting elected State Rep in 2006.
That about sums up the sojourn between my license suspension and its reinstatement, which included along the way the unexpected passing of the Supreme Court Counsel, who had sought my suspension and posed an obstacle to my reinstatement. Maybe the best summation is what Allah says in the Qur’an: “God is with those who patiently persevere.”