Marvin Anderson Concludes His Presidency Remaining Hopeful for the Future
As taken from President Anderson's December remarks: I am grateful for the opportunity to address you one final time as your president as we near the end of 2021.
Thanks to the dedication and hard-work of your Executive Director – Yolanda Jackson, your volunteer board of directors and officers, the staff, association members, and pro bono volunteers, we are able to land in a good place today, better prepared for the challenges to come in 2022.
As I look back over this year, I am impressed and encouraged by the passion, courage, resilience, and generosity of our legal community. As an Association, and a charity, we have endured much, given much, and unfortunately much remains to be done.
We began the year condemning the January 6 assault on democracy in our nation’s capital, and the ensuing violence, and called on our elected officials to take all lawful action to constrain President Trump's unlawful conduct.
We celebrated the historic inauguration of our former board member Kamala Harris as Vice President of the United States, the first woman to be Vice President, the first African American woman, and the first South Asian American to be elected to the position.
We navigated a second year of a global pandemic; all the while continuing to support our community and help in a large way to improve the practice of our profession. We served the homeless population, advocated for immigration reform, raised over $646K in our annual Food From The Bar campaign, and launched a new initiative to diversify the legal profession and demystify the law school admission process.
We advocated for criminal justice reform by supporting public records requests to governmental authorities to determine San Francisco Police Department's involvement in immigration enforcement activities under San Francisco's sanctuary ordinances.
We did this because we need to talk about race. We are often thinking about race in ways that profoundly impact our decisions and understandings. Race is an important factor in the way that our societal systems and institutions are designed and the work that they do. Systemic racism is embedded in the built landscape of our societal norms and legal systems." — Anderson
We supported AB 256 to amend the 2020 landmark legislation California Racial Justice Act (AB 2542) to make the law retroactive to ensure that everyone with unfair convictions and sentences has an opportunity to pursue justice. Although AB 2542 made it possible for a person charged or convicted of a crime to challenge racial bias in their case, it excluded judgments rendered prior to Jan. 1, 2021. Systemic racial disparities have fueled mass incarceration in this state for decades, where according to the Public Policy Institute of California, four out of every ten people incarcerated in state prison are African American men—ten times the imprisonment rate for white men. Similarly, African American women are imprisoned in the state at five times the rate for white women. The California Racial Justice Act for All, AB 256, will extend civil rights protections in California courts to all people charged or convicted of a crime using racial bias.
We were delighted to receive the landmark, unanimous decision by the California Supreme Court published earlier this year, that held California’s bail system violated the federal and state constitutions and judges must now consider a defendant’s ability to pay bail, in addition to the seriousness of the charges and the defendant’s prior criminal history. BASF submitted amicus briefs supporting the conclusion reached by the Court.
We sponsored a Racial Justice speaker series at no charge to the public on such topics as police reform, white privilege/white supremacy, voting rights and eliminating bias from the judiciary. Why did we do this? We did this because we need to talk about race. We are often thinking about race in ways that profoundly impact our decisions and understandings. Race is an important factor in the way that our societal systems and institutions are designed and the work that they do. Systemic racism is embedded in the built landscape of our societal norms and legal systems.
Anderson's racial justice initiative brought audiences compelling discussions with passionate speakers. Click above to see the full recap of each conversation.
In the months following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain and Ahmaud Arbery, it was clear the country needed to put more focused energy towards addressing race and perception bias. And even us lawyers, toiling away at our beloved profession wrapped in the protections afforded by our proximity to white privilege, even we now recognize that the neck on the receiving end of Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee, or the jogger’s abdomen on the receiving end of Travis McMichael’s shotgun blasts could just as easily have been our neck and our abdomen. We need to talk openly about race and perception bias in all of its insidious and overt forms – including ageism, sexism, and homophobia, in order to eliminate its pernicious harmful effects on our societal systems and institutions.
To that end, locally, we consulted with the San Francisco Superior Court to appoint judicial and non-judicial members, to serve on the Court’s Committee on Elimination of Bias and we are pleased that esteemed members of this association leaned in to do this work, namely Terrance Evans, Kevin Benedicto, Kelly Matayoshi and Laura Hurtado (pictured below).
One year ago I shared with you my belief that service to others is the greatest gift one can give to another human being, and to the community at large. We delivered that gift, and more, in 2021. I am proud and honored to have served as the 108th President of the Bar Association of San Francisco and the Justice and Diversity Center of the Bar Association of San Francisco.
