The gaps in access to resources and information for Black people and communities of color are ongoing, as are the efforts to close those gaps. For more than 30 years, the Earl B. Gilliam Bar Association has been coordinating efforts and partnering with community organizations to share information on issues the community is concerned about.
“We provide free legal workshops to the San Diego community that are taught by top local attorneys in a six-week series,” said Taneashia Morrell, vice president of the association, a nonprofit founded to help San Diego’s Black community in advancing its interests, and chair of their Neighborhood Law School series, which begins at 6 p.m. Tuesday at Phillips Temple CME Church in San Diego. “The courses are designed to give useful information on a variety of topics to help the public, employees, business owners, landlords, renters, and anyone else who lives in San Diego.”
Currently, these gaps can be seen in multiple areas. The net worth for Black Americans is 70 percent below that of non-Black households, according to reporting from CNBC earlier this year. The economic benefits of a college degree are also uneven, with substantially higher incomes and greater wealth for college graduates who have a parent with a college education, than for first-generation college graduates, according the Pew Research Center. With housing and real estate, the gaps persist as people with lower incomes, young people, and people of color being more likely to rent rather than own their home, an entry to building wealth. Nationally, the Pew center found that 58 percent of Black households rent, along with 52 percent of Latino households (compared with nearly 28 percent of White and 40 percent of Asian households).
Morrell, who is also a senior contracts and licensing associate at the Salk Institute, took some time to talk about the series — in which they’ve teamed up with the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association and the Legal Aid Society of San Diego — and the association’s goals for helping the community become more informed and empowered. (This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)
Q: When this series first started years ago, what was the association seeing in the community that prompted the idea to start sharing this kind of information with people?
A: I just think that they’ve wanted to be a resource to the community for any type of legal information. So, while we don’t give legal advice, we do provide an overview of various areas, such as knowing your rights, record expungement, immigration, juvenile law, family law, employment, things of that nature. From what I know, the community doesn’t always have access to the legal resources that those in with more affluence have. I would suspect, 35 years ago, that was even more true, especially for the African American community. This is my thought behind why we do it now, that it’s predicated on what’s been done over the last three decades and we want to be able to bridge that gap and provide a general understanding of important legal points.
Q: This year, you’re sharing information on knowing one’s rights, immigration, hate crimes, landlord and tenants’ rights, juvenile law, and more. What did you learn from the 2022 series? What went well and what did you want to improve?
A: One of the things that I definitely saw that went well were the various topics. For example, wills and trusts. We know that, a lot of times, especially in Black and Brown communities, that people don’t think that they should have a will, or they don’t think that they have enough money to have a trust. If you own your house in California, typically those houses are really expensive. The individual who practices in this area of law gave a general overview that if you have a certain amount of money, I think it’s over $200,000, then you may want to put it in a trust so that your stuff doesn’t go through a very long probate. These are things that we’re not taught in our community because we don’t have generational wealth being ed down, although we’re starting to get to that point. So, that was a fairly well attended session, so I thought, ‘OK, that’s what people want to know, information like that.’
Q: As you were putting together this year’s series, what were your goals and how were they different from last year?
A: When I did this last year, it was my first time chairing it and it was a lot. I looked back at the prior year and all of the topics that we did, and from the ones that were most attended, I thought about it and said, ‘Well, instead of it just being predicated on something that I’ve seen last year, or the year before, why don’t I send a survey out?’ So, I went back to look at 2013 (the earliest year I could find information) and began looking at all of the topics we’d covered each year. I found all of the fliers on the web and all the topics that were listed, and these are the topics that we’d covered over the last 10 years. So I asked, ‘Which areas are most appealing to you?’ and then we left that survey up for, maybe, three months. Every week, when we sent out our email blasts, we highlighted the survey. Once we received that information back, I began to tally it and say, ‘These are the most important needs for the community. They really need to know more about immigration and really want to learn more about landlord rights and tenant rights, especially because of COVID.’ That’s basically how I went about deciding which topics were going to be used this year. Furthermore, this is the first time since 2020 that it’s going to be in person and not online [with the exception of the session on hate crimes on Sept. 12].
