Growing up in East St. Louis, attorney Dedra Brock realized that too often people in her community didn’t have a voice – but attorneys did. So at age six, she made up her mind to become a lawyer.
“I remember thinking that I needed to become an attorney so I could help my community – that was my position,” said Brock, an associate at Brown & James law firm. “I had great teachers, and they supported my dream.”
However, Brock’s dreams had to wait when she became a single teenage mother. While other girls were going to parties or leaving for college after high school, she was learning the hard lessons of being a mom, she said.
“It was a lot of hard work and sacrifice,” she said. “But you can either stay where are and be depressed, or go where you are going and deal with the challenges.”
For many years she worked at Ameren in the meter department, the call center and with fleet services to support her two daughters. At 28, she finally saved up enough money to start law school at Saint Louis University. And a year before, she also got married.
She graduated SLU Law in 2009 and went to work with the Land of Lincoln Legal Assistance Foundation, which is an Illinois non-profit group that provides free civil legal services to low-income persons and senior citizens in central and southern Illinois. Brock worked on many cases in East St. Louis, especially domestic violence and housing disputes.
Often the housing cases revolved around landlords who were providing substandard conditions. In some instances, she thought, “I would not have allowed my dog to live in this house.”
Growing up, Brock remembers asking her friends who lived in rundown rental units why they didn’t tell the landlord to repair the building. She didn’t realize then that sometimes landlords refused to fix things, and the families felt powerless to fight back, she said.
“Many landlords were treating the citizens like they should be lucky to have a roof over head,” she said. “I started to fight harder. I would take cases to trial that no one else wanted to take. I worked them up like they were million dollar cases.”
It felt good to give her hometown a voice, she said, and be an agent of change in their lives. Although she now lives in St. Louis’ Central West End, she said East St. Louis is still home.
Brock loved her work at the foundation, but her student loan bills were knocking at the door, she said, making it impossible to stay. So in 2012, she joined Brown & James law firm, where she works on insurance defense cases and participates in the firm’s many training opportunities.
“Brown & James cares about the whole person and not just the attorney in you,” she said.
However, Brock still makes time to take on pro-bono cases with Land of Lincoln. This June, Brock volunteered to represent a woman whose ex-husband had taken her minor daughter from Illinois to Tennessee.
“Half the battle was getting her to feel comfortable confronting her military-made ex-husband,” she said, a situation she had commonly seen growing up in East St. Louis.
Her pro bono legal work is not the only way Brock gives back to her community. Brock serves as the president of Great Things Incorporated, which provides dinner programs (hot meals served restaurant-style) to the homeless, GED programs and tutoring.
Since 2010, Brock has also been helping Associate Circuit Judge Laninya Cason of St. Clair County with facilitating the “Diamonds in the Rough” program that mentors at-risk East St. Louis teen girls (13-14 years old). The topic of becoming a teen mom comes up occasionally, she said, and she talks to the girls about her experience.
“I explain that I had to delay the things I wanted to do,” she said. “I tell them that having a baby is not like having a doll. This is your responsibility.”
Brock feels that the major obstacles are behind her now, and she’s proud that she achieved her goals. Her daughters are on the way to doing the same. Her oldest daughter is a nursing student at Southeast Missouri State University. The other girl ranks in the top 10 students in her high school class and wants to be a journalist.
“There are some bad assumptions out there about people from East St. Louis,” she said. “Now I don’t have to say, ‘Oh, there’s that person from East St. Louis who made it.’ I can say, ‘I am that person from East St. Louis that made it.’”
