Mine were first world white problems.  Despite having a loving family, excellent health, and financial security, my life felt empty. My children had left the nest. We moved to Birmingham, Alabama after living in Atlanta for almost thirty years.  I struggled to find my purpose. I had started back to school to study fine art but the move to Birmingham cut that short.

I decided not to resume my university studies after the move but to focus on portrait painting. Painting the human form requires great skill, and the learning curve is steep. In addition to studying with great teachers, to become a portrait painter one must practice painting people from life.  In the beginning, I was not very good and frankly people were not eager for me to paint them, even for free. But over time, I improved and I still continue to improve.

I was working on my craft when in November 2016, the United States elected Donald Trump.   Another minor headline appeared in the national news. The people of Jefferson County, Alabama, elected nine African American women as judges at the state circuit and district court level. I felt buoyed by this positive news, and the good publicity for Birmingham.  I was already proud of these women and I didn’t even know them or the context of the story. I also felt proud of Birmingham because of its struggle to shake its troubled reputation from the Civil Rights Movement.

I thought how wonderful it would be to paint these women’s portraits, as a way to honor them while giving me valuable painting experience.  The more I thought about it, the more I loved the idea of using art to do something good. Art originated as a way to communicate to an illiterate population. It seemed authentic and relevant to paint these women as a way to share the news of their accomplishments.

I Googled the women. What I found interested me and seemed important.  These women had compelling stories. They were accomplished. They had all overcome significant obstacles. They were deeply involved in their communities, in public service, and in helping others. But it seemed that the national public was hardly aware of what women like this were doing. These women were quietly changing history under the national radar.

I approached two of my painting teachers, Dawn Whitelaw and Michael Shane Neal of Nashville, to see if they would mentor me. Despite their busy careers as two of the country’s leading portrait painters, they were encouraging and supportive of the project and agreed to help me.

Two judges, Agnes Chappell and Tamara Johnson, stepped forward immediately and offered to participate. They believed in what I was doing and took a chance on me. They loved their portraits and the word began to spread. I made countless phone calls and wrote many emails, and eventually other judges came on board. Then I found out that one had an identical twin who was already a judge, and that also a District Attorney had been elected in Bessemer, the first African American female to do so. All of a sudden I had ten portraits to paint.

While I painted, I learned. A lot.

When I met these women, they did not fit my idea of what a judge looked like.  I expected, especially the more senior judges, to be very somber and dowdy. Instead I met lovely, charming, stylish women with warm smiles and kind hearts.

As I painted them over the course of countless sittings, I learned the amazing stories of their lives. They were making history.  They were trailblazers. They overcame adversity. And their motivation to become lawyers and judges was to serve their community more than to prosper themselves.  Many of them had roots in the civil rights era. Some were children in the days of segregation, some knew the families of the girls who were killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Others were descendants of Civil Rights leaders, and still others struggled to get an education and get out of poverty. Two attended law school as single mothers with negligible income.

I was impressed with their complete lack of an attitude of entitlement and their deep sense of fairness. They had a unique form of feminism which included a large portion of Southern charm.  While they were clearly strong women, they to a fault carried themselves with decorum and courtesy. They had all overcome adversity and faced, and still face, racism and discrimination.  They each had stories of discrimination that frankly shocked and disturbed me.

And they all were deeply invested in their community, serving on countless boards, task forces, and community organizations. They were committed to helping African Americans move forward, especially young girls.

I was curious to know the context, the back story.  What did their election mean?

Eventually the context of their victories became clear.  I began to see that they were disrupting the status quo of the court system. I could see that they brought a fresh and needed perspective system to the judicial system of Jefferson County.

There were already African American judges on the bench and even some women.  But nine elected in one election in Alabama was extraordinary, history making. I learned that Jefferson County, like other urban and suburban areas in the South, had a slim white majority that was more moderate, even progressive, and that would cross party lines to vote for a better candidate. I learned that a shift of population from Birmingham to suburbs like Hoover and Vestavia had made the county less conservative.