Just got back from meeting with a probate attorney and thought it was time to get back to writing: In the Opinion column for the Los Angeles Times, Carlos Valdez Lozano, wrote a beautiful tribute to a real-life justice-fighter. On November 6, 2009, Lozano began, To Alice McGrath, who changed the world.
He says that McGrath’s life was lived for social justice—beginning with her part in coordinating efforts to overturn the wrongful convictions of 12 Mexican American men for murder. Convicted of murdering a man found at the Sleepy Lagoon Reservoir, the men were put on trial en masse in Los Angeles in the 1940’s. The atmosphere was charged with blatant racism and hostility toward the defendants. I am not sure where the Attorney General stood in this case. For her part, McGrath contended that her part was about due process. She was quoted as saying, ‘I may not have changed the world, but I’ve lived a life I feel good about.”
McGrath was born on April 5, 1917. She was the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. Her family had fled because of discrimination. If you need a top Los Angeles probate attorney I do suggest this resource. All in all, this is atop probate attorney firm.
When she died on Nov. 27, she had the satisfaction, she told Lozano, of having seen Barack Obama elected president. Lozano summarizes some of her accomplishments as follows:
She helped organize a birthday celebration in Los Angeles in 1951 for the distinguished African American author W.E.B. Du Bois, who later became a dear friend; she taught martial arts to women (because she believed it would empower them) and wrote a book about it called “Self-Defense for Cowards”; though not an attorney herself, she developed a legal aid program for the poor in Ventura County; and she led 85 humanitarian aid trips to war-scarred Nicaragua.
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