Sotomayor Was a Passionate but Civil Activist
By Amy Goldstein and Alec MacGillis
Monday, June 1, 2009
Around Christmas of 1973, a fellow sophomore approached Frank Reed, a leader of Princeton University’s Chicano Caucus, to hand him a formal complaint she had typed up and to ask him to support it.
Sonia Sotomayor was head of the other Latino organization on campus, Acción Puertorriqueña. And after a history of fruitless student talks with Princeton administrators over the lack of Hispanic professors and staff, Sotomayor believed the time had come to lodge a grievance with the federal government over the university’s hiring practices.
The written complaint, filed that April with what was then the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, accused Princeton of an "institutional pattern of discrimination" in hiring "Puerto Rican and Chicano" faculty, as well as in admitting students from those ethnic groups. The strategy, Reed recalled, was "different than anything that had ever been done" by the two student organizations. Neither rowdy nor meek, it reached boldly for outside legal pressure on the university to diversify the campus.
Such a strategy would become vintage Sotomayor: pressing her causes forcefully, while maintaining a civil dialogue. In the nearly two decades between when she came of age and when she joined the federal judiciary, the woman President Obama has now nominated to the Supreme Court demonstrated a passionate engagement at the intersection of ethnic heritage and social justice. She advocated — publicly, aggressively — for inclusion and expanded civil rights, yet always worked within the framework of traditional levers and institutions.
As a Yale law student after she graduated from Princeton, Sotomayor protested to a dean over questions that she contended were discriminatory posed by a Washington law firm at a recruiting dinner. Soon after taking her first job, she joined the board of a Puerto Rican advocacy group that fought for voting, employment and housing rights. She eventually became a board member, too, of a New York nonprofit group that works to improve care for pregnant women and a state agency that promoted homeownership for poor people…
The top priority of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund when she joined its board, for instance, was challenging what it regarded as racial gerrymandering in legislative districts, an issue the Supreme Court is now weighing as it considers a central element of the Voting Rights Act. The fund also fought to reform the hiring process in New York’s police and fire departments, raising some of the questions now under review by the Supreme Court in an employment discrimination case involving the New Haven fire department — a case that Sotomayor ruled on as an appeals judge. And as a board member of the New York Mortgage Agency, Sotomayor helped promote home loans for low-income minorities, an issue central to the recent housing boom and bust.
In Sotomayor’s view, public service "means much more than who writes your paycheck," said Juan Cartagena, a staff lawyer at the defense fund during her affiliation there. "The social justice thing was very natural to her." …
When she arrived at Princeton in the fall of 1972, questions about the racial, ethnic and gender makeup of student bodies and faculties coursed through the Ivy League. Sotomayor’s class was just the third at Princeton that included women. And while the university had begun to expand slowly its small number of Hispanic students, there was not a single full-time Latino professor, nor any class on Latin America. Having been raised in the South Bronx by a widowed mother who worked two jobs to pay her tuition to a Catholic high school, Sotomayor felt estranged from many of her white classmates from privileged backgrounds, friends from her undergraduate years recall.
She found a social world and political causes among students like herself, friends from then recall. She quickly became a leader of the fledgling organization of Puerto Rican students, and she concluded that it would be difficult for Princeton to recruit Latino students without Latinos on its faculty or staff, said Joseph Schubert, another Hispanic undergraduate who was part of the debate and then covered it for the Daily Princetonian, the student newspaper…
According to campus news accounts of the time, Princeton had an affirmative-action plan, but the students alleged that it did not contain hiring goals or timetables for Hispanics, as it did for members of other minority groups. In the end, Reed and others recalled, the school began to hire Latino faculty and increase admissions of Latino students before the federal government ruled on the students’ complaint. Even in prodding the university, "she was always respectful of the institution," recalled William G. Bowen, then Princeton’s president. "Her participation in all these discussions was . . . never acrimonious."
She pushed for curricular change, too. The fall of her junior year, she was "one of the central people," recalled Winn, now a historian at Tufts University, who persuaded him to create a seminar on Puerto Rican history and politics.
Her sense of justice transcended matters of ethnicity. In the winter of her senior year, she was among the three dozen students and faculty members who signed a letter, published in the student newspaper, protesting the ransacking of the dorm room of two gay students. "It is precisely such extreme situations," the letter said, "which measure the willingness of this community to encourage bold new ideas by tolerating dissent."
Sotomayor’s engagement with her heritage broadened into deeper policy concerns at Yale Law School, where she made the law review with an analysis of murky constitutional issues surrounding potential Puerto Rican statehood and seabed rights. But she retained her feisty edge, protesting in the fall of 1978 when, at a recruiting dinner in New Haven, a lawyer from the Washington firm Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge asked her questions that, as she saw it, crossed the line into discrimination.
She challenged lawyer Martin Krall during her formal interview the next day and refused his invitation to come to Washington for a second interview. And she went to Assistant Dean James Zirkle to file a complaint about the questions, which, according to a law school tribunal, included "Would I have been admitted to the law school if I were not a Puerto Rican?"
Sotomayor was "matter-of-fact" about the complaint, Zirkle, now a lawyer for the CIA, recalled in an interview. "I wouldn’t say she was upset emotionally — but she certainly did not like what happened." Zirkle said he never questioned Sotomayor’s account: "She’s a very credible person." He reported the complaint to the firm’s senior partners, who eventually apologized, stating that the questions had been "insensitive and regrettable."
The episode made waves. The Washington Post ran an article about the apology, and several student groups rallied to Sotomayor’s defense. But law school classmate Michael Album, who interned at the same firm as Sotomayor, recalled that Sotomayor was not interested in seeking publicity. She "was not strident by any means," he said. "She was always well balanced."
Law degree in hand, Sotomayor went to work for the Manhattan district attorney but soon found a new outlet for engagement: the Puerto Rican defense fund…
Founded in 1972, and backed by the Ford Foundation, among others, the Puerto Rican defense fund already had achieved victories in promoting bilingual education in the New York schools. Around the time Sotomayor joined, it was on the verge of its biggest coup, a challenge of City Council district lines that it argued were racially gerrymandered. The organization won an injunction forcing a last-minute postponement of the 1981 municipal elections, then a redrawing of the lines.
The organization went on to file successful discrimination challenges against the New York police, fire and sanitation departments; public housing and co-op complexes; and school districts that overused special-education designations for Hispanic pupils…
Showing a particular interest in the area of promoting younger Puerto Rican lawyers and law students, she stayed on the board for a dozen years, throughout her time in private practice, up until her nomination to the bench…
U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero, another co-founder of the organization, noted that many of the issues the fund battled persist today. "They’re issues of social justice that haven’t gone away," he said.
In the late 1980s, Sotomayor broadened her civic involvement, joining the boards of the Maternity Center Association (now called Childbirth Connection), the New York Campaign Finance Board, and the New York Mortgage Agency, which provided discounted mortgage rates and closing-cost help for first-time homeowners in blighted areas and mortgage insurance for low-income housing developments.
Even after judicial rules required her to end her board memberships, Sotomayor has remained active in a less formal capacity: giving frequent speeches, appearing at Puerto Rican Bar Association events, serving as a moot court judge at Yale Law. Between 1999 and 2003, she was a member of the National Council of La Raza [The Race], the large nationwide Hispanic advocacy group at the heart of the immigration debate…
Testifying before the Senate in 1992 at her first confirmation hearing, Sotomayor told Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) that she understood being a judge meant she would need to give up most of her civic roles — a shift that she hinted she would rue. "I as an individual believe that those of us who have opportunities in this life must give them back to those who have less," she said.
So the Washington Post thinks that we are supposed to be comforted by the fact that Ms. Sotoymayor already had a chip on her shoulder when she was 19?
Somehow that she had typed up her list of race-baiting demands is supposed to prove her civility. Granted, we suppose it does show a little more restraint than writing them in blood.
Sophomore Sotomayor had been at Princeton for less than a year and a half, and she already considered herself in a position to be questioning their practices and making demands.
Yes, this is the mark of a mild-mannered person. And certainly the sign of a judicial temperament.
And there is no way that she has made a career out of racial identity politics.
Anyone who would even suggest such a thing must be a lunatic who needs to be silenced.
She’s married to it.
to Rush ( His idea during the Clinton plague upon America ) I am starting a file on “The One,” mostly starting from the election date. 
The election results were long expected, but now that the day has arrived it’s quite a letdown, anyway. Reading about the joy expressed by Hamas and Syria and Italy and Indonesia… contemplating Obama’s Secretary of State, or (God help us) Defense… Thinking about the USA becoming just like Sweden, only with a real army, and aircraft carriers, and nukes… First Lady Michelle…
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
you too!
Are his proposals practical, even if desirable? Maybe they're neither? What might be the unintended consequences? All "reforms" do not succeed; some cause more problems than they solve. Johnson's economic policies, inherited from Kennedy, proved disastrous; they led to the 1970s' "stagflation." The "war on poverty" failed. The press should not be hostile, but it ought to be skeptical.
Who can forget the interview with George Snufalufagous, where George had to correct him when Obama stated, "My Muslim faith...".
I used to think that Obama was merely a leftist who shared the same hatred of the US, Israel, capitalism, and Western Civilization that leftists do. Now, I'm convinced he not only retains the leftist ideology of his Mother, but he's at the very least merged it with Islam while sociopathically lying about his Christian faith. At the very least, he may have the same nutty beliefs that allowed an ordained Episcopal priest, Anne Holmes Redding to claim that she could be Muslim and Christian simultaneously. I'm not ( sure) Jesus and Mohammed had anything in common other than Christ was a Jew, and Mohammed went out of his way to exterminate Jews c.f Banu Qurayza, among Mo's many bloody escapades.
Either way Obama is fundamentally aligned against everything the US and Israel stand for. "
"...One more thing... On the picture you have posted Pamela, do you remember how the media bent over backwards to defend it? They were absolutely appalled Americans were making any kind of connection... "