LAWYERS FOR ONE AMERICA

Is this collaboration more substantial than symbolic?
This initiative is both -- substantive and symbolic.

First, it is symbolic and historic because President Clinton - as part of his Initiative on Race - chose to model his call to action by lawyers on the one issued by President Kennedy in 1963 at a crucial point in the civil rights struggle.
Second, this effort is about lawyers making tangible changes in the social and legal landscape. It's about inspiring a lawyer to help someone with a lease or a tax issue. Or introducing a lawyer who can help a minority entrepreneur to raise capital, or encouraging the general counsel for a corporation to assign more minorities to high-profile matters and to retain minority law firms for outside legal services.

Why this call to action, now?

Even though more Americans of different backgrounds and colors are working together, learning together and living side by side, rigid barriers of discrimination, poverty and isolation still deny equal justice to citizens of all hues.
Moreover, attacks on successful diversity efforts are escalating across the nation.
Now, as when lawyers of another generation enlisted in the struggle for civil rights, America needs the legal community to open wider its doors of opportunity and marshal its formidable skills to help build One America.