I'm Lee Rowland, and this is At Liberty from the ACLU, the podcast that explores the biggest civil rights and civil liberties issues of our day.

In just the past few months, there have been numerous reports of black Americans having the cops called in them for things like waiting in Starbucks, entering their own dorm rooms,

moving into their own apartments, and barbecuing in a public park. Why are we hearing

so much about this kind of incident? And what do these stories say about being black in America

in 2018? Here to help us talk through this is Jeff Robinson. He's head of the Trone Center

for Justice and Equality at the ACLU.

Jeff, thanks so much for being with us today. Thanks for having me, Lee. I appreciate it.

So let me just start by asking you, how did you get here? How did you end up an advocate for

racial justice at the ACLU?

I was born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, and I was 11 years old when King was killed.

He had come to Memphis to lead a march before he was killed, and that march broke into violence.

And I was there with my father and my older brother, and a lot of the people that were arrested were ministers, other leaders in the black community, and so my dad

took me to court. And I watched these people that were called lawyers, and I was amazed.

And I thought, how do you get to be one of them? And my dad, who was a high school

principal, immediately took it as an opportunity to say, well, you have to go to college and then law

school. And that's all these years. And I thought, well, I'll be 26 when I get out of law school.

That's really old. But when I look back from that moment, everything I did was pointed toward law school.

I saw a lawyer standing up and saying that these people that I had been raised to respect

had a right to do what they were doing.

And the fact that they were standing between these people and a system that wanted to hurt them.

That's what I could tell as an 11-year-old.

That was really appealing to me.

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