Breaking Barriers as a
Lawyer and a Judge

When told she couldn't come to court, a white girl in a Southern town sneaked up to the courtroom's “colored” balcony in the 1930s to see her father defend an unpopular client.

Long before Harper Lee wrote about Atticus and Scout Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a teenage Phyllis Kravitch yearned to watch her father work in the Savannah courthouse. Kravitch abandoned the idea of becoming a ballerina.

Kravitch learned from her father, lawyer Aaron Kravitch, that everyone deserves equal treatment under the law, although neither law nor custom was granting it to African-Americans or to women in those days.

Now 94 and a senior judge on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, Kravitch broke barriers and represented people trying to break through, too. The reason she hid in the balcony is that the judge had told her the courtroom's no place for a girl. She has since proved him wrong.