A lawyer's calling
A lawyer’s calling

Learn to do right; seek justice.
Defend the oppressed.
Take up the cause of the fatherless;
plead the case of the widow.

– Isaiah 1:17

It was a Sunday in December 1971, at my grandparents’ home in Mentone, Alabama, halfway down the hundred-mile-long plateau from Chattanooga to Gadsden that is Lookout Mountain. Within a mile radius were the simple homes, church, school and country graveyard intimately entwined with several generations of our family.

At the “children’s table” off the kitchen with my cousins, I could faintly hear the conversation of our elders at