Traffic Ticket, Friends and True Grit Helped Single Mom Become Lawyer
Latina Alston freely admits that she has made some mistakes in life, and, at not quite 30 years old, she is raising three children although she has never been married.
However, she has also accomplished a feat that others with far more money and far fewer family responsibilities have failed to achieve: As a single mom raising young children, she made it through Washburn University School of Law, earning her law degree in 2007, reports the Wichita Eagle in a lengthy article explaining how Alston did it.
Her third child was born in October of 2007, and she is now working at a $45,000-a-year job as an assistant public defender in Sedgwick County, Kansas, after passing the state bar in February 2008. One of 12 African-American law students in her class at Washburn, she is one of only eight African-American attorneys among the 1,175 members of the Wichita Bar Association.
Earlier this month, in her first trial, she helped Public Defender Steve Osburn win an acquittal for a 25-year-old man she describes as factually innocent.
Getting where she is today has been far more of a struggle for Alston than for many other law students; even after graduating from law school, she shared a bedroom with her children in her mother’s two-bedroom, needs-work Wichita home for 19 months, the newspaper reports. A few days before Christmas the family moved into a new Habitat for Humanity home that Alston bought and worked on; now she sleeps on the sofa in the living room so that her mother, a 57-year-old janitor who makes $17,000 a year, can have her own bedroom there.
The support of her mother, law school friends and the director of Wichita’s public libraries, for whom Alston formerly worked at the downtown branch before she started law school in Topeka, all played key roles in Alston’s law school success.
Ironically, a traffic ticket that Alston had feared would derail her law school dream helped solidify it: The July 2004 ticket, for running a stop sign, was issued just as Alston was about to start law school, the Eagle explains. Because she had no insurance and the ticket was her third moving violation within a short time, it could put her in jail, the police officer told her.
Although Alston didn’t tell library director Cynthia Berner Harris about the ticket, Berner Harris found out, the newspaper reports. She insisted on paying Alston’s fine and buying her insurance, and urged her to go to court and explain her situation. Armed with proof of insurance and that her fine was already paid, Alston spoke with Gwendolyn Horsch, the city prosecutor handling her case, who happened to be a graduate of Washburn University School of Law.
Horsch liked the fact that Alston didn’t make excuses, and took her to talk with Judge Richard Shull, who also happened to be a Washburn graduate. He wished her good luck in law school as he signed her court paperwork. Already stunned by the successful outcome of the case, Alston found herself listening to advice from the prosecutor about how to survive her first year of law school as the two rode down in the elevator together afterward.
Getting through, though, was another story. Even with the help of a network of African-American students–all 12 of whom graduated–law school, as a single mom without a regular babysitter, was a slog. Alston says she spent much of her first year in tears.
Alston doesn’t tell many people about her situation, and Osburn, who heard her life story for the first time from someone else shortly before the newspaper article was published, said he was amazed that Alston had graduated.
“I went to Washburn, too, and I had kids, but I had a wife … I had help,” he tells the Eagle. “I can’t imagine what it was like, what she did.”
