A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [56]
Jefferson Sessions, the prosecutor, was soon nominated to the Federal District Court in Alabama, but the proposal died in the Senate Judiciary Committee in part because of concerns raised about his voter fraud prosecutions. Ten years later, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he serves to this day. Judge Cox was elevated to the Court of Appeals. My guess is that they will never understand what happened in that courtroom. Those poor old black sharecroppers never lost their faith—in God, in the kindness of the people who were trying to help, and most especially in the hope that justice was still possible. Like the Jean-Pierres, they seemed genuinely proud and even overcome to see that the meek could be vindicated. That’s certainly why I was crying.
Several years later, at the Department of Justice, I was again inspired by these types of experiences: moments when the yearning for social justice was met with some affirmation against the odds that it was still possible. During my time in the Civil Rights Division, I was back in Alabama and throughout the South in response to a wave of church burnings, and I had a number of those meetings in backwoods churches, where people prayed for strength and comfort before they got down to the earthly business of solving problems together. These were examples of people seeing their stake in their neighbors’ dreams and struggles, as well as their own.
I’d like to think that my commitment to social justice remained consistent even when I wasn’t in the public sector. When I became a corporate executive, I tried to maintain a personal pledge to do good—to make the ladies of Cosmopolitan proud.
Not long after I left the Justice Department, private attorneys settled a closely watched employment discrimination case at Texaco, one of the largest oil and gas companies in the world and a storied brand for decades. The company sponsored variety shows on television and Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. Its jingle—“You can trust your car to the man who wears the star”—was familiar to most people in America then over forty.
The settlement required the court to appoint a task force to implement the agreement, essentially a complex set of policies and actions that would completely transform the company’s employment policies and practices. I was asked to chair the task force and did so for two years. Eventually the CEO asked me to join the company as general counsel. It was a great opportunity to get a different view of the law and of private sector management. Once the company merged with Chevron and Diane and I decided not to relocate to the new headquarters in San Francisco, I moved to Coca-Cola in a similar capacity in the wake of a similar employment discrimination class-action lawsuit. Again, I was asked to implement changes in the employment practices and to oversee the company’s global legal affairs.
I was able to travel around the world to try to solve a great variety of problems in many different cultures—and to make some money as well. Social justice was never far from my mission, even in those corporate settings. I know we made the workplace in both companies more fair and transparent. I worked to make Texaco the first major oil company to stop arguing about the science of climate change and to join those in search of solutions. At Coca-Cola, I worked to resolve serious charges of worker mistreatment at a bottling plant in Colombia and to investigate a whistleblower scandal that ensnared a good, mild-mannered man who was trying to do the right thing. I learned that I need not and would not leave my conscience at the door for any job. Most of the people I worked with shared those values.
Politics presents different challenges to faith. In a world where it seems quite appropriate, even imperative, to address issues of social and economic justice, it can still