When Paulette Brown was growing up in Baltimore, she never dreamed she would become a lawyer. Instead, she wanted to be a social worker, with the end goal of “saving the world,” as she puts it. In Brown’s recollection, her mother always embodied charity and generosity, and those were the values she wanted to elevate in her future career.
“My mother was always involved in a lot of community service, no matter how much money she had,” Brown says. “Even if she only had $10 to give, she would give those $10 to charity. Back in those days it might have been $5. It was the notion that, whatever you had, you shared it, and you always gave back to somebody else.”
Brown was one of four children and the only one of her siblings to attend college. She chose Howard University at the strong encouragement of her school guidance counselor. Although she had dreamed of attending Brown University, it was at Howard that the possibility of becoming a lawyer first occurred to her. The rest was history.
Fast forward several decades and a successful career at a corporate firm, Brown is now the first African-American woman to be president of the American Bar Association (ABA).
In her role as president, Brown hopes to spread awareness about the possibilities of the profession to more young people of color. She plans to visit each of the 50 states, meeting with lawyers and legal organizations. Brown has also made a commitment to visit as many Boys & Girls Clubs as her schedule will allow. By her count, she has already been to 15. Her goal, she says, is to show young people that a career in law is a possibility for everyone.
“I am a first for the American Bar Association and as a result of that I have some unique responsibilities and one of them is to be a role model,” she says. “You can’t aspire to be what you can’t see. So it’s very important to go and let them see me and learn about my life path. I didn’t know any lawyers growing up, there were no lawyers in my family, and yet somehow, here I am.”
Problem at the top
