Black lawyers speak at an assembly for the South Fayette Township School District
Some students in the South Fayette Township School District got to hear from a group of Black legal experts Thursday.
It's part of one school club, Social Handprints Overcoming Unjust Treatment or "SHOUT".
The students there chose to attend the assembly.
"We sent out an email to our students saying that if anyone is interested in law, they can sign up to come see this event," Malak Saeed, a South Fayette SHOUT Organizer, said.
Saeed helped lead the panel of Black lawyers Thursday.
"We kind of wanted some more representation in the law field," she said.
American Bar Association statistics from last year show that the share of White lawyers declined 10 percent from 2014 to 2024 (88 percent to 78 percent, respectively).
Asian (2 percent to 7 percent) and Hispanic (4 percent to 6 percent) representation went up slightly during that time. But with Black people (5 percent in both 2014 and 2024), it stagnated.
Blaine Jones, the founding attorney of Blaine Jones Law and one of Thursday's panelists, saw an opportunity to answer statistics like that with a message of defiance.
"You don't say to yourself well I can't make it because there's only one female attorney," he said. "Forget that, you be that female attorney."
Dr. Chuck Herring helped organize Thursday's venue. He knows the importance of the law.
"If we didn't have the law on our side, we wouldn't have Brown vs. the Board of Education so I wouldn't even be in this space right now," Herring said.
Herring says this space isn't just for people of color to learn too, there's a message for everyone.
"And also our other populations need to see reflections of them to see like, man everybody can do everything when they have an opportunity to do it,'" he said.
