I was reading through my weekly people magazine this week and came across an article about a man who does his best to get the wrongly convicted out of prison. So far he has gotten fifty people released. Of the fifty people who have been released thirty-one where black and three where female. So I decided to look this attorney up. Though he didn't start off as a lawyer he decided he needed to make a difference with his life. He spends all of his time actually re-investigating all these trials and crimes claimed against it's offenders. Though there isn't much about the race and gender of his clients online, in the article I found it to be quite apparent in the pictures of all fifty of them. I think that the thirty-one of the inmates that he set free were black because our system still doesn't recognize them as equal. We still have many biased people in occupations that can mean the difference between life and death, is this the kind of society that we want to let carry on?
This man's name is Jim McCloskey and he very much reminds me of Augustine St. Clair. Someone who recognizes that society is doing something wrong but does his best to make it right. St. Clair took time to get to know Tom just as Jim does with his clients. St. Clair tells Tom that he will free him but doesn't get the chance to because he is killed. I imagine that if Jim where in this time period he would have sought for Tom's freedom. I do wonder if Tom would have stayed free because he likely would go back to Aunt Chloe on the Shelby estate and I wonder if he would become their slave again of if they would treat him as an equal. I also wonder if Jim would have stopped with Tom. I was very moved by this story. Being a Social Work major I choose to make it my life work to help others. Not knowing what exact kind of social worker I want to be, this article gave me some kind of idea of yet another way I can do my part to change the way our society looks at others.
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