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Weekly UpdatesTHE SUDDEN DEATH LAST week of Judge Andree Roaf came as a blow to me, although she and I were barely acquainted. Nonetheless, she was a hero of mine. I want to take this opportunity to explain why.
In the spring of 1999, I was working in Nashville, Tenn., as communications coordinator for the Nashville Bar Association. Part of my job was to publicize the association's Law Day luncheon. My boss had lined up some big-name speaker for the banquet, but I've forgotten who it was because he canceled a few weeks out. Panic ensued as we scrambled to find a suitable replacement who could address that year's national Law Day theme: the quest for equality.
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I suggested Andree Roaf, although I had never met her or heard her speak. I had known her husband, Dr. Clifton Roaf, quite well in the early 1980s, when I was an education reporter for the Pine Bluff Commercial and he was president of the Pine Bluff School Board. I remember hearing that Dr. Roaf's light-skinned wife had been the first black bride pictured in the Commercial--an accidental violation of policy that caused a local uproar in 1963. I also knew that she had become the first African-American on the Arkansas Supreme Court, and I had read in a feature on the Roafs' football-playing son, Willie, that his mother had been born in Nashville.
It was a tenuous connection to Nashville, but my boss was desperate and told me to invite her. Judge Roaf, who was then on the Arkansas Court of Appeals, accepted immediately and seemed delighted at the prospect of returning to her birthplace. She was incredibly gracious about the whole thing, making her own travel arrangements and just generally being a good sport. She brought her husband and parents. It was a treat for me to become reacquainted with Dr. Roar and to meet William and Phoebe Layton, who were students at Fisk University in Nashville when Andree was born in 1941.
Ticket sales were significantly below average for that Law Day luncheon, despite my best efforts to pump up interest. But the Nashville Bar Association members who attended the luncheon were treated to one of the best speeches I've ever heard, and I've heard a lot of them.
I regret that no audio or video of the event exists, but I located the May 1999 Nashville Bar Journal in which the association's president described Judge Roaf's speech as "personal, profound and moving."
It was a beautifully crafted speech in which she explained that, when sworn in as a justice on the state Supreme Court, she took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America--a Constitution that originally denied equality to black Americans and women.
Her speech was pitch-perfect. She reviewed Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education and other landmark decisions in the orderly, scholarly way that appeals to lawyers. But she kept relating that "quest for equality" back to her own life and her struggle to come to terms with a document that had to evolve tremendously before she could swear to uphold it--or even have that opportunity. It was a message about the triumph of law, and I am not exaggerating when I say that old, white, male lawyers were weeping openly.
The original speaker, whoever he was, couldn't possibly have done a better job.
I, of course, was a hero back at the office for my brilliant recovery of the speaker fumble. (I'm a firm believer that the better you are, the luckier you get. But sometimes you just get lucky--and Law Day 1999 was one of my luckier moments.)
Three months later, in one of those strange twists that life takes, I was back home in Little Rock as editor of Arkansas Business. I used to run into Judge Roaf every now and then, and I would always reinforce just how much I appreciated the great favor she had done for me in Nashville. Unfortunately, I hadn't seen her in quite awhile, and now I'll never have another chance to remind her of the time our paths crossed. But I will never forget it.
Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. E-mail her at gmoritz@abpg. com.
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