A Law School Reflection for Black August 2025

Eleven years ago, I was a 2L and a law student activist. That feels strange to say; the passage of time is bewildering. As Black August 2025 ends (a month spent honoring and remembering Black political prisoners and freedom fighters in America and Black liberation struggles worldwide), I want to reflect on my time spent in coalition trying to make our law school a less violent place.

In 2014, I was a founding member of the Coalition at Georgetown Law. We—my law school classmates and I—learned about the murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO on August 9, 2014 online. We watched the Ferguson uprisings unfold on our televisions and phones in real time. We paid special, close attention to the legal proceedings that came out of the uprisings. It couldn’t have been more relevant, watching what we learned in class playing out on the national stage. We watched St. Louis prosecutor Bob McCullough willfully pervert the law, choosing to seek a grand jury indictment instead of arresting officer Darren Wilson (Brown’s murderer) outright. McCullough also didn’t seek specific charges; he left that up to the grand jury to decide whether, if any, charges Wilson should face. The grand jury chose not to indict Wilson, and the Washington Post called McCullough’s prosecution “pathetic.” It wasn’t just pathetic. It was the manifestation of hundreds of years of systemic anti-Black racism in Missouri, and in America. It was the result of the toxic, deadly deference courts pay to law enforcement agents, the horrid result of unbridled qualified immunity, and the prioritization of law enforcement’s fear of potential harm over the actual harms they inflict on Black people of all ages and gender expressions. Our law school’s motto reads, “Law is but the means, justice is the end.” What a bitter pill to swallow, reading that motto on campus while living through events that disproved it at every turn. The school issued no statements and acknowledged nothing of the story gripping the nation.

I wish I could remember the exact sequence of events that came next, but they are a blur. In October 2014, a small but mighty group of us organized and staged die-ins on campus, handing out educational flyers, holding protest signs, and urging our fellow students to pay attention to what was happening in Ferguson and what members of our future profession were doing. We invited our fellow Hoyas to determine what side they were on; what kinds of lawyers would they be? The school acknowledged nothing. In November 2014, protests erupted in D.C. after the non-indictment of Darren Wilson. An overlapping group of us attended protests with thousands of people, first meeting on campus and going on to walk miles through D.C. at night, recycling some of our signs from October, blocking streets and interrupting business as usual. In December 2014, we saw law students at Columbia Law in New York form a coalition and issue an open letter to their law school administration. Their experiences completely echoed ours—a stunning lack of support and responsiveness from their institution. We coalesced and penned our letter to Georgetown Law, forming our own coalition. Around the same time, law students at Harvard Law did the same. We reached out and traded best practices across institutions, shared insights into how our administrations were handling our demands, and felt mutually seen and supported. None of this was unique; these issues were systemic and institutional. In the weeks following, as we geared up for final exams, the Coalition at Georgetown Law—like our peers at other schools—juggled on-campus organizing, requesting and preparing for meetings with administrators, and so much more. We documented our wins and struggles online, building our local community and sharing our experiences with other law students who formed their own coalitions.

We also fielded derision online, from early iterations of the Daily Caller and other ultra-conservative rags. Anonymous, threatening messages of physical violence abounded. Ultra-conservative student groups on campus mocked and co-opted our language; infamously conservative professors publicly decried our protests and belitted our demands (on a school-wide listserv, of all places). So much for viewpoint diversity. We faced an uphill battle with the administration and even with certain faculty members who were reluctant to go beyond immediate damage control and sustain responsiveness past a few weeks.

I often think of how very ugly that time was, and how much uglier they are now for students who continue to seek the same (or better) changes. None of us were doxxed. None of us came to physical harm. The social and political environment at the time were certainly reluctant to take more meaningful, institutional action on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and things moved at a glacial pace. However, DEI at that time had not become anathema; there was not yet the bizarre co-optation of “wokeness,” of “critical race theory,” and more. Back then, we had a shared understanding of what these words meant. Now, meaning has been purposely distorted and turned upside down. Online environments that now breed broad distrust of news sources and undo our shared reality were nascent at that time. In many ways, we were lucky. We spoke up during a brief window where our struggle could achieve some gains, even if they were incremental and (maybe) solely symbolic.

From 2014 onward, the Coalition at Georgetown Law continued trying to hold the administration accountable to the demands we first issued. We participated in meetings, organized trainings, provided data again and again, and welcomed new Coalition members who kept up the work after many of us in the original group graduated a few short years later. Our work led directly to the opening of the Georgetown Law Office of Equity and Inclusion in 2016, and the hiring of a senior-level administrator dedicated solely to DEI. In our way, we tried to leave Georgetown Law better than we left it. And perhaps for a short time, it was better for some students who felt less alienated or unseen, who felt less jarred by the divergence of the law on the page from the law in the world.

I revisit our Coalition website every once in awhile. I encourage you to do so, if it piques your interest. Our fire was contagious; our righteous rage still stings. Our language was searing. I am so proud of what we did, how smart and exacting we were. I wish conditions weren’t worse now than they were back then, but I hope law students who are fighting the same battle today know that they are joining the ranks of many who came before, and that they have siblings in struggle.