Honoring 12 black pioneers in the legal profession

“Until the story of the hunt is told by the lion,” says an African proverb, “the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

And it mostly has. But now it’s the lion’s turn. And if you paid attention in the withering 90-plus temperature of downtown Des Moines July 12, you might have felt its presence. The lion lurked there in the rhythms of drums, and in the shadows of the massive new public art installation, “A Monumental Journey.” Created by the luminary African-American artist Kerry James Marshall, the sculpture depicts a pair of African talking drums rising 30 feet into the air, one perched precariously off balance atop the other.

Commissioned by the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation and supported by a public-private partnership, the piece has been in planning for 18 years. It honors 12 black lawyers who were the founders, in 1925, of the National Bar Association (originally the Negro Bar Association), the oldest and biggest professional association of mostly black lawyers. It got started because black lawyers at the time were denied admission to the American Bar Association.

When the NBA was formed, black lawyers numbered about a thousand nationwide. Today, membership is over 60,000, including judges, law professors and law students. It has 84 chapters around the country and affiliates in Canada, Great Britain, Morocco and the Caribbean.

The association has responded to the shifting challenges of each era. In 1930, it helped block President Herbert Hoover’s nominee, John J. Parker, to the U.S. Supreme Court because of his vocal opposition to civil rights and voting rights. In the 1960s, its attorneys represented black and poor people through free legal clinics in their neighborhoods, while legally challenging segregation and the death penalty. In 1968, the NBA helped found the Council on Legal Education Opportunity to get more African-Americans enrolled in law schools. And in 1928, before any other bar association had a female officer, it had one.

“Whenever there has been a fight to represent the rights of poor people and black people, the NBA has been there,” NBA President Juan R. Thomas told the politicians, philanthropists, art lovers, artists, activists and lawyers gathered at the sculpture dedication. Recalling that the Ku Klux Klan reached its peak the same year the NBA was founded, he also encouraged the crowd to “remember all those who were denied their dignity and denied an education.”

That whole history could have been whitewashed, as difficult aspects of the past often are. But the proverb is right: History must be told equally through the lens of the oppressed and about their responses, and works like this one help do that.

Remarking on how the sculpture’s precarious balance signifies something not yet fully achieved, Thomas spoke of a current “crisis of conscience, character and competence.” He invoked Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile and other African-Americans who were killed or died in custody, declaring, “Two African-American men cannot have a simple cup of coffee in Starbucks without being arrested. An AfricanAmerican woman student at Yale cannot have a nap without” police being called to the common room where she had dozed off.

Past President Arthenia Joyner, who lives in Florida, recalled that when she graduated from law school in 1968, “No one wanted to hire a female attorney”—much less one of color. “So I hired myself and put up a shingle.”

“Take a stand, make a stand for what’s right,” rapped the hip-hop musician MarKaus with guitarist King Wylde at the sculpture’s launch ceremony. “It’s always worth, always worth the fight.”

And easier when you know about the lions that put up resistance.