Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke Delivers Commencement Remarks at the Howard University School of Law

Remarks as Prepared

Thank you, Nia Reese for that kind introduction. And thank you Dean Holley-Walker for your leadership of this historic institution, President Wayne Frederick, distinguished members of the faculty and staff – I am grateful for the invitation to be here today.

It is such an honor to be speaking to the incredible Howard University School of Law Class of 2022. This was not easy. You worked through law school during a pandemic that had a tremendous toll on so many lives. I want to congratulate all of you for reaching this momentous milestone. And, none of us get to where we are without support from those who always have our back. I want to thank all of the people who helped make this possible – all of the family members, friends and loved ones who are with us today, and especially the moms as we gather on the eve of Mother’s Day.  

As I look out onto the audience today – I see our nation’s future civil rights attorneys, future judges, policy makers and elected officials, future law professors, future prosecutors and public defenders, future partners at corporate law firms and general counsels for major corporations and yes, I see a future Supreme Court justice among you.

I want you to take a moment and look to your left, look to your right, look behind you. All of your classmates here today will be people you continue to encounter at every stage of your professional journey. They will be the ones working at the law firm that you consider switching over to, they will be the ones sitting on that panel with you at a conference, they may even be your adversary in the courtroom. At every stage of your career, ensure that your Howard Law School experience proves to be that glue, that bond, that line of support throughout your journey. Hold on to the relationships that you have built here and find ways to support each other throughout the various chapters of your career.

When I think about Howard Law School, I think about this institution’s long and storied history. Charlotte E. Ray – the first Black woman to practice law in the United States who graduated from Howard exactly 150 years ago. Thurgood Marshall, who graduated first in his class, started off his career by hanging up a shingle in Baltimore and launching his own solo law practice, eventually moving on to practice law for the NAACP. Marshall served as the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, helped argue Brown v. Board of Education, served on the federal appeals court, served as the United State Solicitor General and then soared to serve on the highest court in the land. And let’s not forget Charles Hamilton Houston, a former dean who is widely regarded as the architect of the legal strategies used to defeat Jim Crow, racial segregation and institutional racism. On Houston’s watch, Howard Law School moved from a part-time night school to an accredited full-time program that became a magnet for reform-minded lawyers. These illustrious leaders, intellects, and lawyers show us that there is no stopping a determined Howard Law School graduate.

As we reflect on the legacy of this institution, I ask each and every one of you – what will your page in the Howard Law School history book say?  How will you use your law degree to have impact?

You are about to embark on a long professional journey. At times, that journey will feel hard and invigorating; frustrating and exciting, all at once. It may not be a journey with obvious stops or turns. But what may prove most critical is figuring out what your purpose is – what is it that you are supposed to do with this law degree? What is the highest use of your talents? What is your calling? Why were you here?

Some of you may already know the answer to those questions and for others, it may take some time. You may settle into a job that doesn’t quite feel right or into a role where you don’t feel fully challenged. You may be in a job where you feel like there has to be, there must be, a better use of your skills and intellect. You may find yourself stuck in a job that doesn’t inspire you to get out of the bed in the morning. You may discover that your professional interests and desires changed, so you pivot. Amidst all of these scenarios, I want to challenge you to keep asking yourself – What is my purpose? – until the moment that you have a crystal-clear answer to that question. The answer won’t be the same for all of you. You’ll know when you have the answer that is right for you because you’ll feel it in gut and in your heart.

I want to tell you about my explorations into my purpose; my journey into law and civil rights.

To set the scene, my parents immigrated to Brooklyn from Jamaica a few years before I was born. They wanted their kids to have access to better schools and greater opportunities than what they had in the Caribbean. I grew up in Starrett City, the largest public housing complex in the nation – in Brooklyn, New York. At home, the rules were simple: discipline, working hard in school, making the most of any opportunity that might fall your way.

That drive – and a lot of luck – got me a seat at a boarding school in Connecticut. The campus was unlike anything I had ever experienced, full with opportunity and possibility.

During my junior year, my teacher loaded my classmates and me into a van and drove us to a courthouse in Hartford, Connecticut. That day, they were hearing arguments in a landmark school desegregation case.

I mean, I grew up in public housing in Brooklyn, I had never been inside a courtroom before. But, right away, I felt the power of the space. The arguments presented by the lawyers, the evidence of ongoing segregation, the judge in the Black robe with the power to decide whether to breathe life into the goals underlying Brown v. Board of Ed. It was enthralling. A spark was lit. I began to dream of what it would be like to become a civil rights lawyer, dedicated to the fight for justice. I spent a summer in college working alongside a public defender, helping to provide counsel to the poor. While the lawyer spent much of the day in court, I spent the day issuing subpoenas, interviewing witnesses and helping to develop a defense strategy. At this point, my purpose felt crystal clear.

I knew I wanted to be a civil rights attorney.

Now, I couldn’t have known it at the time, but one of the lawyers working on that school desegregation case was John Brittain, a graduate of the Howard Law Class of 1969. Brittain helped build the case from scratch by driving around Hartford and the nearby suburbs, counting how many white kids and Black kids were at each school while tracking the racial inequities in school funding.

Brittain did what I hope we all do in our careers – he brought the voices of the people most impacted into the courtroom with him. He centered the experiences of those on whose behalf he was fighting.

What is your purpose?

After law school, I thought for a second about my debt and the appeal of a generous corporate law firm salary. But I followed my gut and my heart and, started my career off at the United States Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. My very first cases took me to places like Tensas Parish, Louisiana, Clarksdale, Mississippi, and Louisville, Kentucky. The work wasn’t always easy. I remember the hurt I felt when I was dismissively referred to as “girl” on a trip to South Carolina. But I also remember the impact I made, like when an older Black activist in one of the poorest parts of Louisiana pulled me aside after a community meeting to say, “we don’t see lawyers like you very often around here. Thank you for listening to us. Keep fighting for us.”

Since that time, I have continued to follow my gut and my heart, and continued to fight. I have worked on civil rights cases in virtually every corner of the country. After DOJ, I worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund where I fought to protect the voting rights of people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. I fought to defend the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act. I then followed by gut and worked at the New York State Attorney General’s Office. As the state’s top civil rights enforcement officer, I took on banks engaged in redlining, landlords bullying people out of affordable housing, the NYPD’s stop and frisk program, retailers engaged in racial profiling of customers, employers locking out people based on their criminal histories, school districts fueling the school-to-prison pipeline, and more.

I then followed my heart to lead the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, one of the nation’s premier civil rights legal organizations. We fought voter suppression, took on racial discrimination in the criminal justice system, worked to defend race-conscious admissions in the higher education context, and so much more.

And when President Biden called me and asked that I lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, I again, followed my heart and my gut – becoming the first woman and the first Black woman in history to be confirmed by Congress to serve in this role.

I love the work that I do. It gets me up in the morning (and it keeps me up at night!).

I want to encourage you to keep pushing until you find your purpose – work you love to do – as you move along your professional journey.

This takes me to the second point and that is to remember that you secured this law degree at one of the most important moments in American history. You worked towards your law degree during some of the most sustained and powerful racial justice protests in our nation’s modern history. I’m sure many of you were in the streets in the summer of 2020, organizing and demanding fundamental change – change to help make our nation a more racially just and equitable place.

Passion. Anger. Hope. Everything hung heavy in the air in 2020, more than any moment in my lifetime.

You, you are a part of the Black Lives Matter generation. These protests absolutely have shaped the country, and the world, during the course of your law school experience. Protests that were multi-racial, multi-generational and stretched from urban communities to rural regions in every corner of our great nation.

Peaceful demonstrations and protests have always helped bring about change and transformation in our society – those who marched for the right to vote on Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, the students who courageously participated at sit-ins to protest Jim Crow, the young people who boarded Greyhound buses and crossed state lines, the residents of Montgomery who carried out the boycotts, those who pushed to register Black people in the face of violent attempts to keep them disenfranchised, the hundreds of thousands of people who gathered here in our nation’s capital for the March on Washington.

Right alongside these protests, were the lawyers – working hard to use the rule of law to fight for justice. They fought to tear down unconstitutional precedents like Plessy v. Ferguson, they fought to ensure that judges appropriately interpreted and applied the Constitution. They pushed for Congress to pass federal civil rights laws that would provide tools to combat discrimination.

What will this generation – the Black Lives Matter generation – of lawyers do to lead the current rallying cry for justice?

I know that some of you have already been hard at work right here on campus. Many of you served as legal observers during the #BlackburnTakeover demonstrations on campus. Others supported Howard students who protested the killing of George Floyd and called for policing reform.

Beyond Howard’s campus, and across the country, over the past two years, we have seen steps forward toward justice – and many assertive steps backward. But building justice and equity in America is not a momentary or fleeting project. It is the project of a lifetime – it is work that is ongoing, challenging and hard fought.

The summer 2020 protests shined a bright light on racial justice issues that have long been with us. Inequity and injustice has been woven into our institutions for hundreds of years and it will take focused, dedicated work to remove those threads from the American fabric.

But we have to try. That is the challenge for this generation of new lawyers.

Charles Hamilton Houston famously said that “A lawyer’s either a social engineer or … a parasite on society…. A social engineer [is] a highly skilled, perceptive, sensitive lawyer who [understands] the Constitution and [knows] how to explore its uses in the solving of problems of local communities and in bettering conditions of the underprivileged citizens.” Houston’s words embody Howard Law School’s great history, tradition, and special place in the American story.

As you begin your careers, know that a career in civil rights is not the only way to solve the problems we face in society. You can and will become your own best versions of Houston’s “social engineer,” whether by becoming a civil rights lawyer, committing yourself to pro bono work at your law firm, supporting a 501(c)(3), non-profit organization, becoming a volunteering, getting out the vote or staffing a non-partisan election protection hotline. There is no shortage of ways for justice-minded lawyers to make a difference.

Throughout my career, I have worked hard to channel Houston’s ideal in my own approach to the law. My current role at the helm of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department provides a special opportunity to carry forth Houston’s legacy and it is a privilege to lead federal civil rights enforcement at this moment.

Every day at the Justice Department, we are working to protect and promote the right to vote. The fight to ensure that all Americans have voice in our democracy has always been close to my heart. We have taken action across the country challenging restrictive voting laws, discriminatory redistricting plans, and other barriers to the franchise.

We are also taking on the hate crime crisis we face today. Recent FBI data show that there has been a surge in hate crimes committed against Black people, and a terrifying 70% increase in anti-Asian violence. We are also seeing attacks on communities of faith and the LGBTQ community. We are committed to upholding every person’s constitutional right to live free from hate-based violence and intimidation. And I want to be clear – this includes investigating threats against HBCUs and their students.

Earlier this year, we secured federal hate crimes convictions that made clear that Ahmaud Arbery was tragically killed because of his race. Enforcing hate crimes laws sends a powerful message to those who are affected and to the broader community: that they are valued, that their communities are important and that the federal government will not stand by when they are targeted.

We are also addressing systemic misconduct by law enforcement and have opened investigations into police departments in Louisville, Minneapolis, and Phoenix. This work is ongoing.

And where there is evidence that individual law enforcement officers have willfully deprived a person of a right or privilege protected by the Constitution or federal law, we can bring charges. We recently secured federal civil rights convictions against all four former Minneapolis police officers, including Derek Chauvin, for their roles in the killing of George Floyd.

And we are taking on the unconstitutional and inhumane conditions inside our jails and prisons. This work is crucial, given that there are currently over 2 million people residing our nation’s jails and prisons, and people of color and those with mental illness are disproportionately represented among them.

We are fighting for economic and racial justice by enforcing laws that protect fair housing, equal employment opportunity and the rights of people with disabilities.

Simply put, we are on the case. We will continue using all of our federal civil rights laws and the Constitution to ensure equal justice under law for all in our country.

In the midst of this hard, important work, I want to share a recent joyful experience. Last month, I had the privilege of celebrating the Senate confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as our next Supreme Court justice. I know that Dean Holley-Walker and a number of Howard Law Students were present as well. It was a beautiful and moving day. Vice President Kamala Harris observed that with this confirmation we will now have “for the first time, four women sitting on that Court at one time.” And soon to be Justice Jackson reminded us all that: “It has taken 232 years and 115 prior appointments for a Black woman to be selected to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. But we’ve made it.”

So, let’s take stock of the major victories, the successful cases, historic nominations and the glass ceilings that we are shattering. These wins can lift up our spirits when the work feels hard and when the weight of history feels heavy. These wins are your inheritance, and now it is your job to push forward and build on this legacy.

I am so proud to be with you today and thrilled to be one of the very first people to welcome you to the legal profession. I congratulate you and wish you health, happiness and resilience as you take this next step as law school graduates. Thank you for having me here today.