Black women in law reflect ahead of court nomination

ATLANTA — Alisia Adamson Profit, a Black woman who has practiced law for more than a dozen years in central Florida, walked into a courtroom one morning in June for a pretrial hearing, just as she had done countless times.

But this time was different. A court deputy asked Profit — and none of the other lawyers in the courtroom, all of whom were white — for her identification.

It wasn’t the first time she felt singled out as part of a tiny universe of Black women judges and lawyers.

“It’s the idea that somehow I don’t belong here,” said Profit, a former public defender who founded a criminal defense firm based in Orlando, Fla.

As President Joe Biden prepares to nominate the first Black woman to the nation’s highest court, members of the small, elite group of Black women lawyers and judges are reflecting about their place in their profession and watching with complicated emotions.

By some estimates, they represent perhaps just 2 percent of the nation’s 1.3 million lawyers.

Many say they have experienced discrimination or been second-guessed. At times, they have felt dismissed by others in the legal world.

Knowing how isolating that can be, older Black women, many of whom were the first in their families to go to law school, described an instinctive urge to mentor younger Black women. And despite the challenges, they described still loving the law and doing what they considered their dream jobs.

Now, for the first time in their lives, someone who looks like them — and probably experienced similar career challenges — could ascend to the Supreme Court and rule on issues foundational to American lives, from voting and abortion rights to health care and affirmative action.

“Finally. We now have the possibility of a Supreme Court that would look more like America,” said Kara Beverly, 39, an employment lawyer who now works as an equity compliance investigator at Johns Hopkins University.

Biden’s vow to put a Black woman on the Supreme Court has launched conversations across the country about what that would mean.

Many see the president’s promise as a significant step toward overdue representation, closely following the victorious ascent of another Black woman lawyer, Kamala Harris, to the vice presidency.

But along with that excitement is frustration that it has taken more than two centuries for this moment to arrive.

And Black women in the legal community are bracing for the possibility that the yet-to-benamed nominee will be judged unfairly as an affirmative action appointment.

“People are going to say she only got this because she was a Black woman, and that could not be further from the truth. She would not even be considered if she wasn’t qualified, prepared and ready,” said Profit, 38. “There will be a segment that will discredit her ability to serve.”

The expected appointment will become a historic moment in the court’s lumbering progress toward diversity. Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish justice, was appointed in 1916. Thurgood Marshall, the first Black justice, ascended to the court in 1967. Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman, joined 14 years later in 1981. And Sonia Sotomayor took the bench in 2009, becoming the first Hispanic jurist.

With each nomination, the court got closer to representing America.