Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Sotomayor (6 page)

In 1965, as Johnson was about to sign the historic Executive Order 11246 implementing affirmative action, he laid out his views in a commencement speech at Howard University in Washington, D.C. “Freedom is not enough,” he said in the June address to the predominantly black graduating class.

You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.
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President Johnson was speaking of the black experience, yet his words could easily have applied to Sotomayor and other Hispanics. “Equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough,” he said. “Men and women of all races are born with the same range of abilities. But ability is not just the product of birth. Ability is stretched or stunted by the family that you live with, and the neighborhood you live in—by the school you go to and the poverty or the richness of your surroundings. It is the product of a hundred unseen forces playing upon the little infant, the child, and finally the man.”
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President Richard Nixon picked up where the Johnson administration left off. In 1972, the year Sotomayor entered Princeton, the U.S. secretary of labor ordered an increase in the representation of racial and ethnic minorities on campuses. “Almost all leading colleges and professional schools came to believe that they had a role to play in educating minority students,” wrote William Bowen and Derek Bok, former presidents of Princeton and Harvard, in
The Shape of the River
. “Often spurred by student protests on their own campuses, university officials … [took] race into account in the admissions process by accepting qualified black students even if they had lower grades and test scores than white students.” Bowen and Bok said that administrators adopted the policies for traditionally academic reasons: to enrich the education of all students with diversity and to enhance the ability of minorities to become leaders in business and government.
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At the same time, universities and other public entities had to answer to whites who believed they were shut out because of racial policies. Critics argued that affirmative action led to the selection of unprepared minorities and promoted a race consciousness when the country should be moving toward a color-blind society. Sotomayor would experience the backlash, but she would also benefit from affirmative action more often than not.

During Jimmy Carter’s presidency, the recruitment of minorities for the federal judiciary became a national priority. Carter selected an unprecedented number of women, blacks, and Hispanics for federal courts.
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His appointments to the powerful appellate tier of the federal judiciary, directly below the Supreme Court, offered new opportunities to blacks and Latinos in particular: 16.1 percent of his appointees for U.S. courts of appeals were black, and 3.6 percent were Hispanic. Neither Ford nor Nixon had put any blacks or Hispanics on the appeals courts.
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Reynaldo Guerra Garza, a Mexican American, was the first Hispanic appointed to a U.S. court at any level. President Kennedy named him to a district court in Texas in 1961. President Carter elevated Garza to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in 1979.

At the Supreme Court, President Johnson had made history in 1967 with the appointment of the first black justice, Thurgood Marshall, a former appeals court judge who was serving as U.S. solicitor general. The great-grandson of a slave, Marshall was known nationally for taking the lead in litigation against school segregation that culminated in the 1954
Brown v. Board of Education
decision ending the doctrine of “separate but equal.” Born and reared in Baltimore, Marshall, the son of a railroad porter and schoolteacher, devoted his life to helping the poor and disenfranchised. He graduated from Howard University School of Law and became the chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Marshall not only steered the litigation strategy that successfully challenged school segregation, he also shepherded cases against racially restrictive housing covenants and whites-only election primaries. In his public interest work and as a government lawyer, he argued thirty-two cases before the Supreme Court. When President Johnson announced the nomination on June 13, 1967, he said of Marshall, “He is the best qualified by training and by very valuable service to the country. I believe it is the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place.”
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For the shrewd Johnson, Marshall’s nomination was also the politically right move, and it completed a groundbreaking series of initiatives on behalf of minorities, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Still, when Marshall appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for vetting, he was subjected to racial humiliation, most notably from South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, who asked Marshall to name the members of Congress who, in 1866, drafted the language for the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the law.
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The Senate confirmed Marshall by a 69–11 vote. All those who voted against him were Southerners.
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Five years after Marshall’s appointment, Sotomayor entered Princeton, behind her classmates both academically and socially. As a high school student, she had rarely strayed from the Bronx, in contrast to her Princeton classmates who attended prep schools and went off on ski trips and traveled Europe for adventure. Princeton, often called the “northernmost college for Southern gentlemen,” did not admit women until 1969. It also was known for its exclusive eating clubs, which did not go fully coed until 1991—only after a lawsuit by women students forced the issue.

In her early weeks living in a dormitory among wealthy classmates in tony surroundings, Sotomayor fixed her attention on a cricket: “Every night, I tore that room apart looking for the cricket.” When she told her visiting boyfriend, Kevin Noonan, who was earning a degree in science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he laughed because she had not realized that the noisy cricket was outside on a tree branch. The young woman who had grown up with unwelcome cockroaches, not crickets, later wrote, “This was all new to me: we didn’t have trees brushing up against windows in the South Bronx.”
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In the Bronx, trains clattered, police sirens screamed, car horns blared, and people shouted at one another in cramped apartments.

When Sotomayor registered for classes, she felt even more the outsider. She often recounted an incident involving a woman from Alabama who had followed a succession of relatives to Princeton. As Sotomayor listened to the Alabama native talk of her privileged world, two of Sotomayor’s close friends, one Mexican American, one Puerto Rican, approached, laughing and talking loudly. The woman from Alabama eyed them, Sotomayor recalled, and declared “how wonderful” it was that Princeton “had all these strange people.” This was a new twist on the “those people” phrase Sotomayor had heard many times growing up.

But the oft-told tale earned a postscript in Sotomayor’s memoir, as she revealed that rather than greet her approaching friends with the English they usually used, she began speaking in Spanish. “I meant no malice toward the girl from Alabama,” Sotomayor wrote, “but my pulse was speeding with a sense of purpose. Nothing more needed to be said.”
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It was her way to even the score.

When she was admitted to Princeton, only three years after it had allowed women on campus, she did not realize how much her sex or ethnicity had mattered. But several months later the advantage began to dawn on her as she became involved in outreach efforts for other minority students. She recalled her visit to Yale, where she thought it was just a coincidence that two Hispanic students had been assigned to welcome her to the New Haven, Connecticut, campus. In time, she would embrace her experiences with affirmative action and the boost it gave her. She would not find it stigmatizing, as it was to Clarence Thomas, the other minority justice she joined at the Supreme Court. Affirmative action would become central to her success in navigating her way out of the Bronx and passing through the stately buildings of Princeton on her way to the federal bench.

And she set out to prove she deserved the break she got.

But first she had to face the fact that, as educationally nurturing as her mother and high school teachers had been, they had not prepared her for Princeton. The Spanish language that dominated her early years stymied her ability to write fluid English. The
Encyclopaedia Britannica
in her apartment in the Bronxdale Houses could not compare with the well-stocked libraries in the homes of many of her Princeton classmates. She knew nothing of the classics of literature.

Sotomayor went to a Manhattan bookstore the summer after her first year in search of elementary-grade grammar books and vocabulary builders. “I spent two years, every day, memorizing five new words,” she said, “because I just felt deficient compared to my classmates in my mastery of English. These were things I did just to start feeling as if I belonged a little bit.”
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She read
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
,
Huckleberry Finn
, and
Pride and Prejudice
. An English literature professor had taken points off her grade on an essay because Sotomayor had not understood a reference to Lewis Carroll’s classic.

“Who’s Alice?” she found herself saying.
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Sotomayor looked for mentors, and she found one in a history professor, Peter Winn, who in her first semester had returned a paper covered with red marks. “He spent the next four years being my tutor,” she recalled. “Every paper I did, he would correct it and teach me something new about what I was doing wrong.” She said he taught her to shed Spanish conventions that had stuck with her. She had to learn to write, for example, “cotton shirt” rather than “shirt of cotton” and “dictatorial authority” rather than “authority of dictatorship.”
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She did not retreat in humiliation. She did not turn bitter. She developed her own mantra: “How am I
not
going to let this beat me?” In later years she would tell students, “You have to get up and try again. That’s sometimes really hard to do, when you get embarrassed over failure.”
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Sotomayor would take five courses with Winn, who later wrote, “She did not radiate charm or magnetism, nor was she polished or cool. But she had an appealing sincerity and directness, and there was something centered about her that was unusual among first-year minority students at Princeton.” Over the years, Winn said, he saw “a tentative teenager—so intimidated that she never spoke in class during her first semester—become a poised young woman who negotiated successfully with top university administrators on contentious issues such as minority hiring practices.”
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Such activism on behalf of minority employees at Princeton grew out of Sotomayor’s involvement with Acción Puertorriqueña (Puerto Rican Action) and the Third World Center, two groups that attracted like-minded minority students. Established in 1971 in the old Osborn Field House, the homey Third World Center offered newly recruited blacks and Hispanics a refuge from the eating-club culture.

Sotomayor’s efforts on behalf of minority employees at the university brought her attention beyond campus. When she was a sophomore, and cochairman of the Acción Puertorriqueña, she and other Puerto Rican and Chicano students filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare alleging that the university discriminated against its staff. In an essay for
The Daily Princetonian
, Sotomayor wrote that there were no Puerto Rican or Chicano administrators or faculty members on campus. This, she said, reflected a “total absence of regard, concern, and respect for an entire people and their culture” and “an attempt—a successful attempt so far—to relegate an important cultural sector of the population to oblivion.”
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The New York Times
published a story of its own at the time, quoting Sotomayor as saying, “Princeton is following a policy of benign neutrality and is not making substantive efforts to change.”
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Sotomayor learned early on the importance of being visible when she raised complaints. A month after the first news stories, a representative of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare’s Civil Rights Division met with the students and an associate provost about the alleged discrimination.
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Sotomayor was a product of the rough-and-tumble Bronx, yet she was also her mother’s studious daughter and a creation of the strict Catholic school structure. She believed in process. She went through channels. She did not demonstrate. She did not walk out, as other minorities of her generation did, including some who would one day become friends and allies.

While Sotomayor was at Princeton typing up complaints, Charles Ogletree, an African American who would become a Harvard law professor and one of those friends, was organizing a graduation walkout at Stanford University. Ogletree was raised in the California Central Valley town of Merced by parents who had grown up in the Jim Crow South and never finished high school. A year before Sotomayor entered Princeton, Ogletree was admitted to Stanford, where he was itching to challenge authority. He described the sixty-eight African American students among the fifteen hundred freshmen in 1971 as standing out and speaking up: “We wore our hair in Afros the size of small planets and donned bell-bottom pants for every occasion. We danced to the music of Earth, Wind and Fire and enjoyed the mellow sounds of Barry White, Isaac Hayes, and Aretha Franklin. We were also in constant search of reasons to protest.”
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In his senior year, Ogletree helped stage a graduation walkout after he and other black students discovered that the commencement speaker would be Daniel Patrick Moynihan, coauthor of
Beyond the Melting Pot
, a former economic adviser to President Nixon, and then U.S. ambassador to India.