When I needed help, my family and friends were always supportive. My oldest sister, Razene, would read my schoolwork to me, and over the years, I had friends who would read me my coursework and assignments.

Jesslyn had a math lab with me at Tech. Now, math classes and labs are difficult for a blind person. While a seeing person can see practical examples of math, a visually impaired person must imagine the examples.

But, a strong mind is similar to a bodybuilder and distance runner’s physique. My mind had adapted over the years to be very quick and to retain information – especially the information I recorded on my iPhone and repeatedly listened to.

Eventually, I realized the law and my ministry are complementary.

As a child, I loved legal shows and watching people in the courtroom. Though I didn’t have any lawyers in my family… but instead a bunch of convicts. And I didn’t have any lawyer friends until I went to law school. But in hindsight, even when I told myself I wasn’t going to college, I always knew I was going to be an attorney. 
 

Today, I live as two sides of a weird coin. I am a preacher on one side and a lawyer on the other.

Getting Into A Good Law School

At the start, law school in Mississippi was different from school and college near home in Louisiana. Law school was a lot like military boot camp… During the first two weeks, they try to break you.

During the first few weeks of law school, I was still waiting for the arrival of my laptop and the accessibility software that read to me. These items didn’t arrive until after the first couple of weeks of the semester. 

Before my first class, we law school students had orientation for our legal writing course. The professor, Professor Simone, assigned a 10-page analysis paper on the patterns of facts found in 300 pages of reading material.

Of course, I knew that all you do in the first year of law school is read and write. Each course in that first semester of law school assigned 40 to 60 pages of reading—a day.

Ironically, I didn’t even own one book throughout my entire undergraduate years. I would just listen to the lectures over and over again and hope that whatever I was tested on was in the lecture. If there were assignments out of the book, I’d find a friend in the course and get the questions out of their book.

During my entire undergraduate years, I’d ask a class friend to read it to me, but in Mississippi, I didn’t know a soul. 

The Good Advice I Got When I Was Quitting Too Early

About three weeks in, I was demoralized. So, I went and sat down with MC Law’s Dean of Students, Sherry Johnson, who is now a practicing attorney in Jackson, Mississippi. I told her, “I appreciate the opportunity, but I don’t think I can do this. This isn’t for me. I cannot keep up with this workload. I’m way behind and I don’t even have my JAWS software to help me get through this yet.”

Of course, the law school had the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which required them to accommodate students with such challenges.

Dean Johnson gave me the best advice anyone has ever given me. After pointing out that the law school was ADA compliant, she said, “We’re going to do what we can to help you out. I will speak to your professors and discuss with them that they have to give you time to figure things out while waiting on the company to ship the JAWS software. It’s not your fault...”

“But here’s the deal,” she said, “You’re already here this semester. So why not stay for a while? Why not give It a semester and make your choice then?” She added, “The worst-case scenario is that at the end of the semester, you go home and know law school is not for you. But at least by the end of the fall, you’ll know you didn’t quit too early.”

Over time, that software did come in, along with my computer, and my professors gave me extensions on the assignments. I was on the road to figuring it out.

Even better, in my first class in Federal Civil Procedure, there was a group of us that wound up sitting next to each other in the back row of our classes. We friends called ourselves the ‘Back-Row Bandits.’

My back row friends helped me out. At the end of that semester, grades came out and I, who almost quit after three weeks, was ranked second in the class.

Today, all of these bandits are practicing attorneys in Mississippi. We still talk every day.

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