LYNN — In June 2010, sixth grader Junee Barber was at Thurgood Marshall Middle School’s Law Day listening to Judge Stacey Fortes speak to students about her field. It was the first time Barber saw someone who looked like her, a Black woman, in the career that she wanted to pursue.
“For so long I had to carry that motivation myself and I had to push myself to keep going because, you know, I can do it, but seeing someone who looked like me do exactly what I wanted to do was all the motivation I needed,” Barber said.
Even in the sixth grade, Barber knew she wanted a career in law. Now, 13 years later, Barber was back at Marshall Middle School Monday morning for Law Day as a second-year law student at the University of Maryland to talk to the students with Fortes.
Since Law Day, in 2010, she said she has followed Fortes’ career.
“It’s just been so amazing to cheer her on from the sidelines, because even she didn’t know the impact she had on my life,” Barber said. “Getting to speak to all of you guys today, it’s great for me because I hope that I can have that big impact on your life, because all it took was one person for me to keep going, and maybe I can be that for one of you.”
Barber and Fortes talked to the students about Thurgood Marshall, the school’s namesake. Marshall was a civil rights lawyer who later served as the first African-American justice on the Supreme Court.
Fortes, who became the chief justice of the state’s District Court in July 2022, said Marshall was a big inspiration for her when she was a kid.
“I was the first person in my family to graduate from college, nobody in my family had ever been to college, and I knew based upon reading about Thurgood Marshall and other heroes that one day I wanted to be a lawyer because I wanted to help fix things and make things equal for everyone,” she said.
Marshall represented the plaintiffs in the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case in 1954, which ended segregation in public schools. He is also the reason Barber can attend the Francis King Carey School of Law at the University of Maryland, she said.
“Thurgood Marshall could not get into my law school at the University of Maryland because at the time, they did not educate black men or women,” Barber said. “He went on to go to Howard and he graduated from law school. And he filed a lawsuit against the University of Maryland Law.”
Tristan Smith, a recent Suffolk University Law School graduate and coach at St. Mary’s, was also present to speak to the students. He attended Salem State University for his bachelor’s degree and said that many think of it as just a safety school.
“I graduated near the top of my class and got a full scholarship to law school out of Salem State,” Smith said. “The school that everyone says, ‘Oh, that’s just the school down the street’… it was very good to me.”
Fortes told the students that “no dream is too big.”
“If you work hard, you can be anything, and it doesn’t have to be as a lawyer or a judge, it can be anything,” she said. “A police officer, a teacher, nurse, anything you want to be. I just want you to remember that.”
In an interview after the event, Barber and Fortes said their advice to young students who want to go into law is to not give up, and look for support from others in the field.
“It’s going to get rough and it’s going to be hard, and everyone’s journey is different so don’t compare yourself to others, and just keep pushing,” Barber said. “If it’s something you really want to do, you can do it.”
Attorney James J. Carrigan created Law Day as a Lynn Public Schools program to teach students about the field. On Monday, Carrigan had Judge Ina Howard-Hogan and Barber on his Lynn Community Television show, “The American Dream,” to talk about Law Day.
The rest of the speakers for Law Day 2023 can be seen below:
