There’s a particular kind of electricity that fills a room when young people gather to imagine freedom. I felt it the moment I walked into Howard University School of Law (“HUSL”) for the 22nd Annual Wiley A. Branton Symposium. The theme, “Good Trouble: Unleashing Power, Policy, and the Voice of the People,” wasn’t just printed on programs[1] and projected on screens. It was alive in the bodies of students who leaned forward in their seats, who locked eyes with panelists when brutal truths were spoken, who nodded with recognition when we dared to name what too many institutions still refuse to acknowledge: the law, as constructed, was never designed for all of us to thrive.

I’ve spent my career teaching babies—from kindergartners tracing their ABCs to college students grappling with the architecture of oppression, from young activists finding their voices to seasoned advocates remembering why they started this work in the first place. On my podcast, Teach the Babies, I explore what it means to honor ancestral wisdom while preparing for revolutionary times.[2] But that November day at Howard, I found myself in the rare position of being a student again, learning from the brilliance, hunger, and clarity of vision that law students brought to conversations about power.

The Weight of the Room

When Professor Lia Epperson moderated our panel, “Seizing the Reins of Power: From Classroom to Courtroom,” I sat alongside accomplished legal scholars and practitioners who have dedicated their careers to justice: Dean Cedric M. Powell of Howard University School of Law, Professor Fred Smith from Stanford Law School, and Professor Brenda Gibson from Wake Forest University School of Law. The conversation[3] was designed to explore how power is constructed through education and law, how it’s distributed, maintained, and potentially reimagined. These are not small questions. They are the questions that determine who gets to breathe freely, who gets to exist without constant surveillance, and who gets to dream without the weight of systems crushing those dreams before they become palpable.

But as the conversation unfolded, I felt a familiar tension building in my chest—the same tension I’ve felt in classrooms when I’ve watched brilliant minds self-censor, when I’ve witnessed the careful choreography of respectability politics override the urgency of truth-telling. Don’t misunderstand me: my fellow panelists were exceptional, thoughtful, and accomplished. And there was something in the air, something I’ve encountered in countless professional spaces where those of us who have “made it” into institutions are expected to speak about transformation while being careful not to threaten the very structures that granted us conditional access.

I was honored to be enrolled in the process of helping kindergartners and third grade students make sense of who they are in this world they didn’t ask to be born into. They taught me more about resilience than any graduate seminar ever could. I’ve taught college students who were simultaneously brilliant and exhausted, navigating systems that demanded their excellence while withholding the resources necessary to fully manifest it. And what I learned from all those babies—what they taught me—is that politeness in the face of injustice is not neutrality. It is complicity.

The Question I Had to Ask

At one point during the panel, I couldn’t hold it anymore. I turned to one of my fellow panelists and asked a question that I knew might disrupt the carefully maintained equilibrium of academic discourse: Can you truly trust that the institution of the law will show up for us? For those of us whose experiences have been illuminated by critical race theory and intersectionality theory? And if we can’t—if history and present reality have taught us that the law often arrives too late, if at all—then what novel strategies can we employ to defend and expand democracy?

My question hung in the air for a moment. I watched my colleague’s face, watched the room, watched the students. And in that watching, I saw what I needed to see: recognition. The students knew what I was asking. They’d been asking it themselves, in late-night study sessions and coffee shop conversations, in the moments when doctrine collided with lived experience, when they were told to “think like a lawyer.” Still, they couldn’t shake the feeling that thinking like a lawyer sometimes meant thinking like someone who doesn’t look like us, doesn’t live like us, doesn’t risk what we risk.

The law, after all, is a tool. And like any tool, its utility depends on who wields it and toward what ends. We’ve seen the law used to uphold slavery and to end it, to enforce segregation and to dismantle it, to criminalize existence and to protect it. The question isn’t whether the law can be a tool for liberation—we know it can. The question is whether we’re willing to acknowledge that the institution of law, as currently structured, is more committed to its own preservation than to the freedom dreams of those who have been systematically excluded from its creation.

This is not cynicism. This is clarity. And clarity, I’ve learned from every classroom I’ve ever stood in, is the first requirement of effective resistance.

The Politics of Politeness and the Price of Restraint

Let me be explicit about what I mean by “the politics of politeness.” I’m talking about the unspoken rules that govern how marginalized people are expected to advocate for their own humanity. We’re taught to be reasonable, to consider all sides, to acknowledge complexity, to temper our demands with an awareness of what’s “realistic” or “feasible” or “politically possible.” We’re taught that anger is unproductive, that directness is unprofessional, that naming white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism as organizing logics of oppression is too radical, too divisive, too risky.

But here’s what I know from my time as the first Executive Director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans under President Obama: politeness doesn’t protect us. Respectability doesn’t save us. Playing by rules that were written to ensure our failure doesn’t lead to our success. It leads to exhaustion, to the erosion of democracy, to the insidious internalization of the very logics we claim to resist.

The lawyers on my panel were brilliant. They’ve dedicated their lives to justice. And I sensed in some of their responses a restraint that has been honed by years of navigating predominantly white institutions, by the subtle and not-so-subtle messages that to be taken seriously, we must moderate our critiques, that to be effective, we must work within the system rather than fundamentally challenging it.

And I understand that impulse. I’ve felt it myself. There’s a strategic calculus to institutional work, a recognition that sometimes you have to speak the language of power to disrupt it (the master’s tools), that sometimes access requires compromise. There’s a difference between tactical restraint and internalizing the belief that your whole, unfiltered truth is somehow too much, too aggressive, too threatening to be voiced in professional spaces.

What the Students Taught Me

While the panel discussion unfolded, I was watching the students. Not in a distant, observational way, but with the attentiveness of a forever teacher who knows that the most critical learning often happens in the spaces between words, in the body language of people processing new information, in the quick glances exchanged when something true and uncomfortable is finally named.

I saw students nod when I challenged whether the institution of law would show up for us. I saw them lean back and cross their arms when responses felt too measured, too careful. I saw them light up when we talked about novel strategies, about the need to challenge precedent, about acknowledging that those who hoard power will rewrite rules to maintain that hoarding and that our job is to disrupt those rewrites with equal creativity and strategic boldness.

After the panel, the questions students asked were incisive, urgent, and unafraid. They weren’t asking for permission to imagine different futures. They were asking for tools, for frameworks, for examples of what good trouble looks like in courtrooms and policy rooms and community organizing spaces. They were asking, in essence, the same question I’d posed to my fellow panelist: How do we use the tools of the law to dismantle legal structures that were built to exclude us?

And that’s when I knew: these students don’t need us to model politeness. They need us to model courage. They don’t need us to demonstrate how to navigate oppressive systems with grace. They need us to show them how to imagine and build liberatory alternatives.

In the weeks following the symposium, I had the privilege of speaking with Juliette Stanley, the Editor-in-Chief of the Howard Law Journal, on my podcast, Teach the Babies.[4] Juliette is a former chemistry teacher who walked away from the classroom not because she stopped loving her students, but because she realized that the problem wasn’t in her building—it was in the law. She recognized that systemic change requires engaging systems at their roots, and for her, that meant law school.

Our conversation was remarkable for many reasons, but what struck me most was how naturally Juliette talked about teaching. Even as she leads one of the nation’s most prestigious law journals, even as she prepares to enter the legal profession, she understands that her work is still teaching. Every brief she writes, every case she analyzes, every conversation she facilitates about civil and human rights—it’s all in service of teaching future generations how to recognize injustice and refuse to accept it as inevitable.

Juliette told me about a former student who called her just to say he was finally at peace.[5] That moment, that recognition that teaching is a relationship, that impact is measured in transformed lives, not just test scores or case wins, is what connects those of us who have been called to classrooms, whether those classrooms have chalkboards or courtrooms or podcast studios.

We bonded over this shared understanding: that we’re both classroom teachers who have applied the lessons learned in that space to other sectors, all to change systems that weren’t designed for us to thrive. And we’re committed to ensuring that we do thrive, that we teach all the babies how to thrive, that we refuse the false choice between institutional access and revolutionary vision.

When I say, “teach all the babies,” I’m not being cute or diminutive. I’m being deadly serious. I’m talking about a pedagogical and political commitment to ensuring that everyone, regardless of age, irrespective of whether they hold a J.D. or a high school diploma, has access to the knowledge, skills, and frameworks necessary to recognize and resist oppression.

In the context of legal education and practice, teaching all the babies means several things:

First, it means demystifying the law. Too often, legal knowledge is hoarded, gatekept, and presented as the exclusive domain of those who can afford elite education and navigate the credentialing systems that reproduce class and racial hierarchies. But the law shapes everyone’s life. Everyone deserves to understand it, to interrogate it, to imagine how it could be different.

Second, it means centering those whom legal systems have most harmed in conversations about and efforts to facilitate legal reform. This isn’t charity or inclusion for inclusion’s sake. This is a strategic necessity. Those who experience the sharp edge of the law most acutely often have the most precise analysis of how it functions and the most creative visions for how it could be transformed. If your legal education doesn’t regularly put you in conversation with currently and formerly incarcerated people, with undocumented immigrants, with sex workers, with disabled people, with Black trans people, with deaf and hard of hearing people, with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, with everyone the law has been used to criminalize and control—then your legal education is incomplete.

Third, teaching all the babies means acknowledging that the classroom is everywhere. Juliette learned this when a student’s question about insufficient chairs led her to realize that education policy, not just pedagogical practice, was the site of intervention. I learned it in my work at the White House, where every policy conversation was an opportunity to teach policymakers about the lived realities of African American students. I learn it every day at the National Black Justice Collective,[6] where our work to end racism, homophobia, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning+ and same-gender loving (“LGBTQ+/SGL”) bias, stigma, and discrimination requires constantly teaching—teaching media how to cover our communities, teaching legislators how their policies impact us, teaching each other how to show up in solidarity across difference.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, teaching all the babies means refusing to accept the limitations that institutions place on our imagination. Law schools teach case law and statutory interpretation. They teach legal writing and oral argument. But do they teach how to organize communities to create the political conditions that make justice possible? Do they teach how to use media to shift narratives? Do they teach how to build coalitions across movements? Do they teach that sometimes the most legally sound strategy is less effective than the most politically bold one?

I want everyone who has the privilege of studying and practicing law to recognize that privilege for what it is: a responsibility to teach. To teach those who will never set foot in a law school but whose lives are shaped by legal decisions every single day. To teach each other, across ideological and methodological divides, how to build the world we claim to want. To teach the next generation not just how to think like lawyers, but how to think like freedom fighters who happen to use legal tools in service of liberation.

The John Lewis Legacy: Necessary Trouble in Dangerous Times

The symposium’s theme invoked Congressman (and my birthday twin) John Robert Lewis’s call to “get in good trouble, necessary trouble[.]”[7] It’s a call that resonates deeply in this moment, when American democracy is under assault from multiple directions, when the legal and political gains of previous generations are being systematically dismantled, when those of us committed to justice must decide whether we will defend old ground or dare to imagine new territory.

Congressman Lewis understood something crucial: respectability has never protected Black people. Legality has never protected Black people. The law itself has never been our salvation. It has been a terrain of struggle. On this site, we fight for recognition of our humanity against a legal tradition that long defined us as property, that continues to criminalize our existence, and that deploys the language of rights and due process to maintain structural inequality.

Good trouble, in Lewis’s framework, wasn’t about being polite or patient. It was about strategic disruption, about making injustice visible and untenable, about creating crises that forced institutions to respond. The students who sat-in at lunch counters weren’t engaging in dialogue with segregationists. They were refusing the terms of engagement that segregation offered. They were saying, through their bodies and their persistence, that the law as written was illegitimate, and that their defiance was, in fact, the highest form of legal and moral reasoning.

This is what I wanted to surface during our panel at Howard: that we need more practitioners who understand the law as a site of struggle, not just as a set of rules to be mastered and applied. We need lawyers who can code-switch—who can write brilliant briefs and file persuasive motions, argue compellingly before judges, and communicate clearly to the community—but who never forget that the law, as currently constructed, is often the problem, not the solution.

We need legal education that teaches students to challenge precedent, not just cite it. That teaches them to recognize when the rules are being rewritten to facilitate power hoarding, and to develop strategies to disrupt those rewrites. That teaches them that sometimes the most important legal work happens outside courtrooms, in community spaces where people are building the political power necessary to make legal victories meaningful and sustainable.

The Stakes: Democracy, Education, and Everything

Someone asked me recently what’s at stake in this moment. I said: everything. And I meant it.

We’re living through a time when the fundamental premises of multiracial democracy are actively contested, when public education is under systematic attack from those who recognize that an educated populace is a threat to authoritarianism. When the legal frameworks that made even limited progress possible—from Brown v. Board of Education[8] to Obergefell v. Hodges[9]—are being actively undermined by a Supreme Court that has abandoned any pretense of impartiality.

For Black people, for women, for LGBTQ+/SGL people, for people with disabilities, for everyone who exists at the intersections of marginalized identities, the stakes are not abstract. They are embodied. They show up in school board meetings where books about our lives are banned, in legislative sessions where our rights are stripped away, in courtrooms where our humanity is debated, in police encounters where our survival is uncertain, in emergency rooms where our pain is dismissed, in voting booths that are increasingly hard to access, in inaccessible buildings and transportation systems, in guardianship proceedings that strip autonomy, in nursing facilities and institutions where disabled people are warehoused and abused.

And yet—and this is crucial—despair is not an option. As my mother, Edith Johns, told me when we recorded a conversation for my podcast: “I finally am at peace. I don’t fight as much as I used to. I’m healthier than I have been in years, and I never knew what peace was until about a year ago.”[10] My mother found peace not by giving up the fight, but by understanding that resistance must be sustainable, that we must find ways to engage in necessary trouble without destroying ourselves in the process.

This is part of what I wanted to convey to the students at Howard: that the work of justice is a marathon, not a sprint (shout out to the great educator Nipsey Hussle). We need strategies that allow us to show up consistently, powerfully, and creatively. That good trouble requires discernment—knowing when to push and when to rest, when to engage institutions and when to build alternatives to them, when to use the tools of the law and when to recognize that legal strategies alone will never be sufficient.

What Leadership Looks Like: Learning from Juliette

When I observed Juliette Stanley leading at the symposium, I saw something that gave me tremendous hope. I saw a young Black woman who had been a teacher, who understood that teaching is fundamentally about seeing people’s potential and creating conditions for that potential to flourish, bringing that same ethos to legal work.

During our podcast conversation, Juliette talked about the dangerous reality of how prior convictions silence Black voices in courtrooms, about the importance of grace—especially grace for yourself—as a tool for anyone fighting for justice. She talked about missing the classroom, about the specific joy of watching students have breakthrough moments, about the impossibility of leaving teaching behind once it’s become part of your identity.

And I realized: this is what we need more of in legal education and practice. We need people who understand that law is pedagogy, that every interaction with the legal system is teaching something—about power, about worth, about who matters and who doesn’t. We need lawyers who are teachers, who bring that sensibility to their work, who refuse to accept that professional excellence requires abandoning care, compassion, and the belief that everyone deserves to understand the systems that shape their lives.

Juliette embodies this. She left the classroom because she recognized that the problems her students faced—insufficient resources, criminalization, the school-to-prison pipeline, the school-to-sex trafficking pipeline—weren’t problems she could solve with better lesson plans. They were legal problems, policy problems, problems that required engaging the law itself. But she didn’t leave teaching. She expanded her classroom.

This is what I mean when I say we must teach all the babies. It’s not a retreat from specialized knowledge or professional expertise. It’s a commitment to ensuring that such knowledge and expertise are always in service of collective liberation, always accountable to those most impacted by injustice, always humble enough to recognize that the people closest to the problem are closest to the solution.

Radical Approaches: Imagining Beyond Reform

So, what are the “more radical, less restrained approaches” I referenced during the panel?[11] What does it actually mean to challenge precedent, to rewrite rules, to disrupt power hoarding?

It means recognizing that the law is not neutral or objective, that it has always been a tool of power, and that transformative justice requires more than skillful manipulation of existing legal frameworks. It means being willing to say that some legal structures cannot be reformed—they must be abolished and replaced.

It means drawing inspiration from movements that understood the limitations of legal strategy. The Civil Rights Movement, for all its legal victories, was most effective when it combined litigation with direct action, with economic pressure, with massive organizing that created political crises requiring response. Brown v. Board[12] was significant, but it was the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, and the Selma to Montgomery marches that created the conditions for meaningful legal change.

It means recognizing that procedural justice—making sure everyone has access to courts, ensuring due process—is not the same as substantive justice. A legal system can operate perfectly according to its own rules while still producing profoundly unjust outcomes. This is why intersectionality theory and critical race theory are so vital: they give us frameworks for understanding how formally neutral rules produce racially and otherwise stratified results.

It means being willing to use the law strategically while maintaining a healthy skepticism about it. File the lawsuit and organize the protest. Win the case and build the political movement that ensures the win is enforced. Cite precedent and be prepared to argue for overturning it. Work within institutions and create alternatives to them.

Most importantly, it means centering those who have been most marginalized in defining what justice looks like. Not as objects of pity or charity, but as subjects with agency, with analysis, with vision. This is why the National Black Justice Collective’s work is explicitly intersectional—we recognize that Black LGBTQ+/SGL people and Black people with disabilities, particularly Black trans women and Black people with disabilities, face compounded vulnerabilities that require compound responses. We can’t address racism without addressing homophobia, transphobia/transmisognior,[13] and ableism. We can’t address LGBTQ+ oppression without addressing racism and economic injustice. We can’t address disability justice without addressing how race, sexuality, and gender identity shape access to care, autonomy, and dignity.

The good news is we can do it all. #BlackExcellence.

The Promise: What Howard Students Are Teaching Us

As I left the symposium that day, I carried with me a renewed sense of hope. Not the naive hope that things will inevitably get better, but the grounded, hard-won hope that comes from witnessing a new generation refuse to accept the limitations of the past.

The Howard Law students I encountered weren’t asking for permission to imagine differently. They were demanding the tools to build differently. They weren’t satisfied with incremental progress. They were insisting on transformation. They weren’t content to become lawyers who happen to be Black, queer, women, disabled, working-class. They were determined to become Black lawyers, queer lawyers, women lawyers, disabled lawyers, working-class lawyers who bring their full identities and the insights those identities provide to the practice of law.

This is what gives me hope: that there’s a generation standing on business that has been politicized by crisis, that has watched democracy buckle under the weight of white mediocrity and authoritarianism, that has seen how supposedly neutral institutions consistently fail to protect the most vulnerable, and that has decided not to accept those failures as inevitable.

These students are teaching us what we need to know: that respectability politics won’t save us, that playing by rules designed for our exclusion won’t lead to our inclusion, that good trouble isn’t just a historical strategy but a contemporary necessity.

They’re reminding us that teaching isn’t just what happens in classrooms. It’s what happens every time we choose courage over comfort, truth over politeness, liberation over access, collective freedom over individual advancement. It’s what happens when we refuse to let institutions define the boundaries of what’s possible.

A Call to Action: Teaching as Resistance

I want to end with a call to action, specifically for everyone who has the privilege of studying and practicing law: use your time, talent, and treasures to teach all the babies.

This means:

Demystify your knowledge.

Write op-eds, host community education sessions, and create accessible resources that help people understand their rights and the legal systems that shape their lives. Don’t hoard knowledge behind professional jargon and expensive consultations.

Center the marginalized.

In your practice, in your scholarship, in your teaching, in your advocacy—center those who legal systems have most harmed. Not as case studies or examples, but as collaborators and leaders. Learn from them. Let them set the agenda.

Challenge harmful precedent.

Don’t just cite cases; interrogate them. When you see a precedent that upholds oppression, name it as such. Argue for its reversal. Be willing to lose cases in service of building a record that future advocates can use.

Recognize that legal victories are often the result of political organizing, not just skilled lawyering. Invest time in building coalitions, in supporting community organizers, in creating the political conditions that make legal change possible and sustainable.

Teach each other.

Share strategies, failures, and insights. Create spaces for difficult conversations about how to balance institutional work with revolutionary vision, how to sustain yourself in work that is often traumatizing, and how to maintain hope without slipping into naivety.

Be willing to fail.

The most important legal work is often the riskiest, the least certain, the most likely to result in immediate losses. File the cases that push the boundaries. Make the arguments that seem impossible. Create the precedent for future generations, even if you don’t win today.

Remember who you serve.

Not the institution, not your own career advancement, not even the law itself as an abstract concept. You serve the people who need justice, who deserve liberation, who are waiting for those of us with access to institutional power to use that power in service of collective freedom.

Conclusion: The Classroom is Everywhere

When I walked out of HUSL that day, I carried with me the energy of students who reminded me why I do this work. I carried the weight of knowing that we’re living through a moment when democracy itself is precarious, when the legal frameworks that made even limited progress possible are under attack, when those of us committed to justice must choose between defending old ground and imagining new territory.

But I also carried the certainty that we’re not alone in this work. That there’s a generation coming up that refuses to accept oppression as inevitable. That there are students, teachers, lawyers, organizers, dreamers, and fighters who are getting into good, necessary trouble every single day.

The classroom is everywhere. The courtroom is a classroom. The policy room is a classroom. The protest is a classroom. The podcast is a classroom. Every interaction we have is an opportunity to teach and to learn, to model what courage looks like, to imagine what freedom could be.

At the NBJC, we work to end racism, homophobia, and LGBTQ+/SGL bias and stigma. This work requires teaching constantly—teaching media, teaching legislators, teaching communities, teaching each other. It requires recognizing that liberation is not a destination but a practice, not something we achieve once but something we must enact every single day.

The 22nd Annual Wiley A. Branton Symposium reminded me of this.[14] It reminded me that good trouble isn’t just a slogan; it’s a methodology. It reminded me that the politics of politeness is a trap, that institutional access without revolutionary vision is compliance, that teaching all the babies is the most radical act we can commit.

To the students I met that day at Howard: thank you for your questions, your energy, your refusal to accept easy answers. Thank you for reminding me why I became a teacher in the first place, why I continue to teach even in spaces that don’t call themselves classrooms. Thank you for the hope you carry, not the naive hope of the privileged but the grounded hope of those who know struggle intimately and choose resistance anyway.

To my fellow panelists—Dean Cedric M. Powell, Professor Fred Smith, Professor Brenda Gibson, and our moderator Professor Lia Epperson: thank you for your brilliance, your dedication, and your commitment to justice. Especially in moments of disagreement or tension, even when I pushed against the constraints of professional discourse, I recognized that we’re all engaged in the same struggle, just with different strategies and from various positions.

To everyone reading this: remember that the law is a tool, nothing more and nothing less. Tools can be used to build or to destroy, to liberate, or to oppress. The question is not whether we engage the law, but how we engage it, toward what ends, in service of whom.

And remember this above all: teach the babies. All of them. Everywhere. Always. Because the future we’re fighting for depends on what we’re teaching today.

Our democracy is fragile. Our legal systems are designed to reproduce inequality. The moment we’re living through is perilous. But we are not powerless. We have knowledge, we have each other, we have the ancestors whose shoulders we stand on and the young people whose futures we fight for.

Let’s get into some good trouble. Let’s challenge precedent. Let’s refuse to be restrained by the politics of politeness. Let’s teach all the babies how to imagine and build the world they deserve.

This is what Wiley A. Branton understood when he fought to desegregate Little Rock Central High School. This is what John Lewis understood when he walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. This is what every freedom fighter who came before us understood: that justice delayed is justice denied, that waiting for permission is a form of surrender, that good trouble is not just necessary—it’s the only path forward.

May we have the courage to walk that path. May we have the wisdom to teach each other along the way. May we have the audacity to believe that another world is possible, and the commitment to build it, one classroom, one courtroom, one policy room, one moment of necessary trouble at a time.

Thank you, Howard University School of Law, for reminding me why this work matters. Thank you for creating space for difficult conversations. Thank you for embodying the legacy of Wiley A. Branton, of John Lewis, of every educator and advocate who understood that teaching is the most revolutionary act, and that all the babies—every single one of us—deserve to be taught how to be free.

  1. Howard Law Journal, 22nd Annual Wiley A. Branton Symposium Program, 69 How. L.J. __ (2026).

  2. See generally Teach the Babies w/ Dr. David J. Johns (Apple Podcasts) (examining the intersection of education access, race, and how government impacts the teaching of our babies).

  3. Howard U. School of Law, Wiley A. Branton Symposium 2025 (YouTube, Feb. 18, 2026), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nsu91gJJSvE [hereinafter Branton 2025 Video].

  4. Teach the Babies w/ Dr. David J. Johns: Juliette Stanley Is Getting into Good Trouble Through Law (Apple Podcasts, Dec. 16, 2025).

  5. Id.

  6. Home, Nat’l Black Just. Collective, https://nbjc.org/ [https://perma.cc/G9LX-63XW].

  7. Maxine Thome, Getting in Good Trouble. Remembering John Lewis, Nat’l Ass’n of Soc. Workers (Aug. 8, 2020), https://www.nasw-michigan.org/news/523810/Getting-in-Good-Trouble.-Remembering-John-Lewis.htm [https://perma.cc/D7K5-MZXF].

  8. 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

  9. 575 U.S. 644 (2015).

  10. Teach the Babies w/ Dr. David J. Johns: Lessons from Mamas and Mother Figures (Apple Podcasts, Mar. 7, 2025).

  11. Branton 2025 Video, supra note 3.

  12. Brown, 347 U.S. at 483.

  13. See generally Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Seal Press 2007).

  14. Howard Law Journal, supra note 1.