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Friend,
I am a homeless lawyer.
No, I have never personally experienced homelessness. But it is fitting that the first thing you know about me is that I am a lawyer who has spent nearly my entire legal career representing people who do not have a safe place to call home.
It is, after all, the first thing we are told about a person – that they are homeless. Most often it is the only thing we ever know, without ever learning the person’s name. It reads like a credential, erasing any other identity such as parent, sibling, neighbor or friend. So I wear my own credential – that of a homeless lawyer – in solidarity with the people whose names I know and whose stories I carry.
It is this work that brought me to the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2021, where I currently serve as the deputy legal director of the Economic Justice Project. In this role, I lead a team of lawyers and legal professionals working across the Deep South to advance the SPLC’s goal of eradicating poverty by expanding access to opportunity and eliminating racial economic inequality.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, states across the country began issuing orders for people to stay at home to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. The ability to stay home without severe economic consequences depended in large part on the types of jobs people held. The pandemic instantly realigned our society across a new driver of inequality: those who can choose to stay home to protect their health, and those who cannot.
But for the more than 500,000 individuals experiencing homelessness in our country, how do you stay home when you do not have a place to call home?
The pandemic revealed again and again the safety and stability that only housing provides, which is not available to all on equal terms. Racism in our housing and economic systems has created a homelessness crisis that disproportionately impacts Black and Brown communities. African Americans make up 13% of the general population but 40% of the unhoused population.
Cities across the country, and in the Deep South where we work, have responded to the visibility of people who are unhoused and unsheltered in our communities with laws restricting sleeping or camping outdoors. These laws are unconstitutional because they punish individuals for being human beings who need sleep, a life-sustaining activity that must occur at some time and some place. For most of us, that is our homes. But for too many of our unhoused friends and neighbors, these ordinances make their very existence a crime.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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