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Rebecca
Arrington
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| Sarah
Anthony |
Anthony
defender of public good
By
Charlotte Crystal
Eight
years ago, Sarah Anthony, who’s graduating from the University’s
School of Law this
month, helped Billings, Montana, show the world its religious
tolerance in the face of anti-Semitic violence.
When
a local Ku Klux Klan member threw a brick through a Jewish family’s
front window in Decembaer 1993, the Billings Coalition for Human
Rights, which she chaired, printed and distributed 10,000 drawings
of a menorah around the city.
People
of all faiths posted the paper menorahs in their windows that
year in a show of solidarity that made national news.
Anthony
has been seeking ways to serve others since she was a teen, when
she cared for severely retarded adults and worked for an Easter
Seals program in Connecticut. At Carleton College in Northfield,
Minn., she studied with Paul Wellstone, then a political science
professor and now a U.S. senator, who taught classes such as “Grassroots
Movements and Protest Politics.” She also took a course from
liberation theologist Robert McAfee Brown that examined the efforts
liberal Catholic priests were making in Central America to hasten
social, economic and political change.
Anthony
graduated from Carleton in 1988 with a major in Latin American
studies. After college, she set off alone for a three-month trip
to El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala, armed with
only her college Spanish and a notebook.
While
taken by the revolutionary fervor of the times, she learned she
was better suited for other struggles closer to home.
Wellstone
helped Anthony land a job as a grassroots organizer with Montana
People’s Action in Billings, where she worked with a poor
neighborhood composed mainly of native Americans and whites.
Enter
Julian Bond, chair of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People and U.Va. history professor. He spoke in Billings
at an event her group sponsored, and she asked him abaout law
school. Bond encouraged her to pursue public-interest law at U.Va.,
which she did.
Anthony
won a $15,000 Mortimer Caplin and Linda A. Fairstein Public Service
Fellowship, which provided tuition assistance for her final year
in law school and also will supplement her salary for two years,
enabling her to take a low-paying job in public-interest law.
That
job is at Fair Trial Initiative, a small group of lawyers in Chapel
Hill, N.C., who are concerned that the public defense provided
to indigent defendants charged with capital murder — and
facing the death penalty — falls short of what the authors
of the U.S. Constitution intended.
“Did
you know that defense attorneys have, on average, only three hours
to prepare for each capital case?” she asks. “That is
woefully inadequate representation.”
She
plans to do something about that.
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