Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 28, 1993 TAG: 9303260010
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BY CAROL KLEIMAN CHICAGO TRIBUNE
DATELINE: CHICAGO LENGTH: Medium
And it did something else: The demeanor of Hill, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma and former civil rights attorney for the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, sparked interest among young black women in becoming lawyers.
"Anita Hill was a profile in courage, and young women saw they can be a lawyer and still retain their integrity," said Margaret Burnham, partner in a Boston law firm made up of five black female attorneys. The firm, founded in 1989, specializes in civil rights litigation.
"Notwithstanding the obstacles, I believe Professor Hill will inspire young black women to enter the law, and we'll see an increase intheir numbers," said Burnham, a law professor at Massachusetts In- stitute of Technology and a former state court judge.
But opportunities are few: There are 800,000 lawyers in the United States, 157,000 of them women and 11,006 of them black women, reports the American Bar Foundation.
Though there is no breakdown by race, in 1988 only 35 percent of all female attorneys worked for private law firms, where the big money is; 32 percent had solo practices; 13 percent worked in government; 9 percent, private industry; and 2 percent, the judiciary.
The rest worked in "other areas" too small to analyze. One is academia, where Anita Hill is one of only 360 black law school professors.
Between 1981 and 1987 only 7.6 percent of faculty members hired by law schools for tenure-track positions were black women.
The glass ceiling that exists at law schools is exemplified by the unsuccessful attempt in 1990 by Professor Derrick Bell to get Harvard Law School to hire its first black woman in a tenured faculty position. Harvard's tenure-track faculty still has no black female.
"The glass ceiling is especially harsh on black women," said Burnham, former head of the National Conference of Black Lawyers. "Though there are outstanding female attorneys who are black, the more reliable indicator of how things are is the number of those who remain behind."
Cheryl Harris, assistant professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology, says that "generally, black women attorneys are fighting the same barriers as other black women in the workplace, struggling against perceptions of race, gender and class."
Harris, 40, is co-chairwoman of the National Conference of Black Lawyers and a member of the Northeast Corridor Black Women's Law Collective. She was a political science major at Wellesley College and a 1978 graduate of Northwestern School of Law.
Her first job was with a small Chicago law firm. "I was the only woman, but it was a nurturing environment," she said.
But she faced racism and sexism outside the office. "I went to a courthouse in suburban Wheaton [Ill.] on a criminal case," Harris said. "When I walked up with my white client, the clerk asked me for my bond slip. Obviously, I had to be the client and the white man the lawyer. The same thing happened in the courtroom when I went to sit at counsel's table."
Three years later, when the late Harold Washington was elected Chicago's first black mayor, Harris was hired by the city's corporation counsel.
She worked in various legal capacities for the city until 1990, when she joined Chicago-Kent's law school faculty as the first black woman on a tenure track - instead of becoming a highly paid corporate attorney.
"I'm not likely to be comfortable working for white corporate law firms, fighting over a client's real estate contract," said Harris, who earns $70,000 a year. "It's not my reason for going to law school. I really enjoy teaching."
The attorney has incisive observations about Anita Hill's testimony. "The issue of sexual harassment is not believed when it comes from black women," said Harris. "After all, their bodies were the first workplace, where they as slaves were supposed to be sexually available to any man and the vehicle through which slaves were produced."
The presumption, therefore, is that black women cannot be raped or sexually harassed, the attorney said.
"Anita Hill challenged those presumptions," said Harris. "We owe her a tremendous debt for giving a face and voice to black women that basically had not been perceived in their full complexity."
by CNB