From the Archives: Justice Sotomayor on Her Life on the Bench

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. We are delighted to have Supreme Court Justice and Bronx native Sonia Sotomayor with us now. For new memoir, My Beloved World is getting national attention, largely for her thoughts about affirmative action and her intimate story of growing up with diabetes in a somewhat dysfunctional family.

We'll touch on those things, but also on some of the stories in the book that are very New York, like moving from a Bronx tenement to the Soundview houses, the public housing project, and then to co-op city or attending Cardinal Spellman High School, or working for DA Robert Morgenthau, and the state of New York Mortgage Agency and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund PRLDEF and the city's Campaign Finance Board. Justice Sotomayor, it is such an honor to have you. You're an inspiration to so many people from the Bronx, and all over our area, so welcome to WNYC.

Sonia Sotomayor: Brian, thank you very much for having me today. It's delightful to talk to you. It's always nice to talk to people in my own hometown.

Brian Lehrer: Can you tell us where was the tenement building where you spent your early years, and what was it like on that block for a little girl?

Sonia Sotomayor: Well, it was Kelly Street. Even at the time, it was decaying. The stairways were very very dark, and the walls were peeling. At that time, as you may remember, there was a problem with lead paint, but who knew about lead paint back then, but you could see it in the paling walls, and the neighborhood had already become crime-ridden. As the book details, most of my childhood, the neighborhood was called Fort Apache, one of the worst crime areas in the nation at the time.

It was a difficult neighborhood in the sense of so many challenges for so many people, whether it was drugs or poverty or crime, each of it presented its own problems. What the book tries to do is to get past the superficial, which is what most people think about when they think about those old neighborhoods, they think about the negative.

I very much try in my book to remind people that there are people in those neighborhoods, and really people just like them, with the same family values, with the same sense of love and caring about neighbors, and the same sense of wanting to do better in life. Not everyone in a poor neighborhood is a criminal. I think that my story details that reality, that part of the reality that people often don't see.

Brian Lehrer: When you move to the Soundview houses, you write about some of your relatives thinking life in the projects would be isolating. How would you compare the quality of life in that complex of 13 buildings and the public housing complex model to the low-rise private tenement you had been in before?

Sonia Sotomayor: Well, not a story that made it into my book because there were a lot of stories that ended up on the cutting floor of trying to tell a good story. The very first day I moved into the project, the whole family was there trying to help us move in. My cousin Nelson, who I describe in the book as my childhood friend and soulmate and I were on tricycles. We had just gotten them a few months before. We started to ride our bicycles down the hallway, and my wheel spokes scratched the wall.

I stopped, I looked and my heart was broken. This apartment was the brightest, cleanest space I had ever been in. All of a sudden, I had caused a dirt mark on this pristine wall. I was absolutely crestfallen. I grabbed Nelson off of his bike, and they had already put it in my mom's bed in the back bedroom. I took him and we crawled under the bed, and we heard because I was sure that as soon as one of our parents noticed what I had done, I'd get a wallop again.

Well, we stayed very very quiet for a long time and all of a sudden I hear one of our aunts screaming out, "Where is Sonia, where's Nelson?" Everybody's now looking for us and we can hear them. Nelson's mom, [unintelligible 00:04:52] Carmen started to cry, and Nelson finally broke free and ran to her. It was a moment that I have never forgotten and probably my earliest memory in life.

Brian Lehrer: The moral of the story is?

Sonia Sotomayor: The moral of the story was that I had moved from a decaying neighborhood to a brand new project. They were called projects back then, with 13 buildings that had arisen in an area that was completely isolated. There were no stores around us, there was nothing but these beautiful apartments, and the seeds of grass coming up because they had even put in fields where we could imagine grass appearing years later. In fact, I was just there. I don't know if any in the viewing public saw me on 60 Minutes, but we were walking through the old neighborhood. It took a lot of years, more than 50, but the grass has finally grown.

Brian Lehrer: Sonia Sotomayor my guest on WNYC, My Beloved World her new memoir. I gather from the book that you grew up, unfamiliar with Alice in Wonderland, but a regular watcher of Perry Mason, how did that happen in each case?

Sonia Sotomayor: Well, you grow up in a culture that's different, and a background that's different than other people's. My mother and father were huge readers, but neither of them had been educated professionally. My mom made it through high school here in the States, and my dad only made it through sixth grade. Neither of them had any knowledge about classic reading materials for kids, even though both of them loved newspapers. My mom read the Reader's Digest cover to cover, and whatever she could get her hands on, but there was no one to educate them to have them help us.

It wasn't until I got to Princeton, I went to college, that one day I was describing to my roommate how alien I felt at Princeton. This was an environment like no other that I had ever experienced. She looked at me and she said, "Well, it's a little bit like Alice in Wonderland." I responded, "What's Alice in Wonderland?" She very kindly, as she was in so many things in explaining things I didn't understand to me, told me that it was a classic that I had to read, and I did.

I spent that first summer at Princeton, reading all of the classics that she listed as important. I got my full of Alice in Wonderland. I read Huckleberry Finn, and Moby Dick and a whole bunch of others that really changed my life around because although I had like my mother enjoyed reading, and I had read every book on whatever summer lists I was given not just the 5 or 10 I was required to read, this was the first that I was going back to basics, and getting my fill of great literature.

Brian Lehrer: Regarding Perry Mason on television, you write about watching that series, first giving you the bug to become a judge. I was wondering why a judge why the big part in  Perry Mason's world rather than the hero Basin himself, who was a defense attorney winning justice for the falsely accused?

Sonia Sotomayor: In one episode, at the end of the case, after Perry had broken down the guilty party, he turned to the judge and said, "Your Honor, something like, I moved to dismiss the charges against my client and release him." The judge said, "Motion granted bailiff release the defendant." Something inside of me at that moment looked at what just happened. We had watched the show for nearly an hour with Perry the center of attention, but the final scene, the scene that released the defendant was the action of the judge. I had a very, perhaps naive, but also unsophisticated reaction.

Really, at the end, I said to myself, the most important person is the judge. He makes the final decision. It happened to be a he and as you may know, that was the more common state of things back then, but it was a moment that stayed with me for the rest of my life. The aspiration to be first a lawyer, and then a judge were the barest outline of my future, and they were the motivation for me to want to first graduate from college, then go to law school, become a lawyer, and then hopefully someday a judge.

Brian Lehrer: Cardinal Spellman High School. I was fascinated by your description of your junior year history teacher Miss Katz, who you described as the first progressive you had ever encountered up close after 11 years of education by memorization in Catholic school. This would have been around 1970 or so. Who was this Miss Katz and what made her a progressive?

Sonia Sotomayor: Well, who is Miss Katz? She was the first Jewish teacher that I knew the school had ever hired. I had no idea that even back then Catholic schools were having some difficult-- Well, I shouldn't say back then, because today, I know there are teachers who are looking for jobs, who can't find them with all the cutbacks that have happened in many schools. There are even Catholic schools that are now closing, including my old Grammar school, which I'm heartbroken about.

What made her progressive? She by her own self-description was a radical. She and her boyfriend were heavily involved in progressive social issues in Latin America. She challenged us to think critically about history, not merely to recite facts, but to analyze the forces that led to conditions throughout history. That was the first time someone challenged me to think analytically. For me, that was a progressive teacher.

Brian Lehrer: Also challenge you to think politically?

Sonia Sotomayor: Now, that's an interesting question. Yes. My book describes the seeds of my thinking about public and social engagement. She was and she and her boyfriend were working for these conditions by her own description because they thought that people needed help in ensuring that they received good treatment and decent living.

This was the first that I started to hear people talking in that way, the seeds of what would later become the civil rights movement, the sense of a society that would look to being involved and engaged in its well-being. She was the one that planted the seeds of my thinking about what kind of person and citizen did I want to be. In the end, I chose to be an involved citizen, something that I advocate to kids all the time.

When kids, kids or adults ask me, "What do I think about a particular law?" My response almost always is, "Look, I can't tell you what I think about a law that I'm going to be judging as a judge, but I can tell you, that what's really important is what you think. Because if you like a law, it's important for you to support it. If you don't like it, it's equally as important for you to get out there and change it. We're responsible for being a part of our society." Miss Katz to her credit, and I hope that she reads my book and recognizes herself, gave me the beginning of that thinking.

Brian Lehrer: As a low-income Puerto Rican kid growing up in the Bronx, in the '60s, you hadn't been exposed to progressives before junior year of high school?

Sonia Sotomayor: I was a protected kid from a Puerto Rican family. Still, I was living then in Co-Op city, but most of my family was still in the South Bronx, and I visited them regularly. I worked part of my summer jobs in the South Bronx. My schooling was in a Catholic school, were named after the bishop, the city Bishop, who was the icon of the Vietnam War and support the troops. The idea of being progressive or socially involved in the ways I'm talking about were not part of the world that I was in at that time.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue re-airing our interview with Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and we'll have a Supreme Court by the numbers quiz coming up. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Sotomayor, the title of your book My Beloved World is contained in a poem that you have just inside the cover the poem to Puerto Rico I return by Jose Garcia Benitez, and the part that you excerpt says unless you'd like to recite it.

Sonia Sotomayor: I don't have it with me believe it or not, I'm traveling. I'm sorry.

Brian Lehrer: I understand. I put you on the spot, we could have arranged that in advance, but you quoted, "Forgive the exile this sweet frenzy. I return to my beloved world in love with the land where I was born." Does the title My Beloved World refer to Puerto Rico?

Sonia Sotomayor: No. That's not quite the right answer. It really refers to my world in its entirety, but Puerto Rico is very much part of my world. It's folded into that. Most of my childhood, I never got past the Bronx in Puerto Rico. If we took any vacations during my childhood, it was because of that. It was because of the Pan Am Airbus, which I described in the book. It was the first discounted travel that an airline ever offered, and it was from New York to Puerto Rico. It was the way that many poor Puerto Ricans in New York City could go back and visit the place they were born in. My very tiny little world at the time included an island that many miles away.

Brian Lehrer: You write about working for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund PRLDEF, and you write that PRLDEF civil rights activities were grossly distorted during your Supreme Court confirmation hearings. How would you set the record straight?

Sonia Sotomayor: To tell people that what PRLDEF was and is. It's called LatinoJustice today, is a vehicle to ensure that the voices of Latinos in the community and their needs are heard. They advocate positions that might not be popular, but so do all groups who are speaking for or on behalf of people who have needs and want them expressed.

The idea that somehow they were a radical group, or that they were out of the times in any meaningful way, was just an unfair characterization. This was not a radical group of hotheads, this was a group of professionals in the community who were committed to giving back to our communities, and ensuring that the voices of need that existed were being heard. I thought during the hearing that it was just so grossly unfair to paint it as a left-wing group because it took positions which at the time advocated ideas that people were exploring within the courts. Some were rejected, some were accepted, and made a huge difference in our society.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have a position on statehood for Puerto Rico?

Sonia Sotomayor: I don't. I don't because for the same reason that I don't express my personal opinions about any other issue that captivates the public. Look, if you're a part of the society, you have to be thinking about its questions. You do hold your own personal views of how you'll vote if you're put into the ballot box, but I don't express a view that I'm going to say publicly, because I fear that people are going to give it more importance than it deserves, but more importantly, because I can anticipate that if the rights of statehood are given to Puerto Rican someday, there will be some legal challenges to the process. It's inevitable.

There were almost at every state of entry into the Union. When Hawaii and Alaska were admitted, there were many legal questions that were bandied about, including those having to do with which lands would be given over to federal trust conservation purposes, or not. I miss-answered that question. Yes, I have a personal opinion, but no, it's not what I share publicly.

Brian Lehrer: Similarly, is there nothing you could say about your own feelings on this 40th anniversary today of Roe vs. Wade?

Sonia Sotomayor: No. For the very same reason. On that one, we are still hearing challenges to Roe vs. Wade, in cert petitions on a regular basis. For those listeners who don't know what cert petitions are, in laypersons terms, they're the requests of people for us to review and hear their case. Those requests are called writs of certiorari. They ask the court or they point out to the court why a question is important, the legal question is important, and make arguments as to why we should hear that particular case.

Brian Lehrer: My guest Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Her new memoir is called My Beloved World. Jose in Woodside, you're on the air with justice Sotomayor. Hello, Jose.

Jose: Hi. Miss Sotomayor, I am also Puerto Rican. I'm 68 years old. I don't know if we are contemporaries or not, but in another way, we had contemporaries in another way, but actually the opposites, because I was not brought up the same way you were brought up. I was brought up on the other side, which is you're out on your own, we came here when I was six years old. I had to educate myself. I had to go through this whole public education system and interacting with people and the language that I did not understand until I educated myself into that language.

Brian Lehrer: What's your question.

Jose: My question to you is the ethical moral background that you are now in my beautiful world and you have a moral and ethical values that you're not espousing because you feel that the only thing that you need is critical thinking and critical thinking is okay, but how did you educate people, especially from our backgrounds who don't have have those moral, ethical background preparations on which to base moral thinking. Yes, you can say, "I can't tell you how I feel. I can't tell you what I think you have to think for yourself," But many people have, when you say, "Think for yourself," It's just you just don't start thinking for yourself.

Brian Lehrer: Jose, I'm going to leave it there, but it's a very, very deep question Justice Sotomayor.

Justice Sotomayor: Jose you're right. I was fortunate because I lived within the embrace of a very supportive family who may not have known what I should have been reading, but who gave me examples about basic values. Not everyone has that opportunity, but one of the things that my book tries to do is the message that you're asking me to deliver, which is all of us, even those who are self-made or perceive themselves as self-made, as like you, have had someone in your life, whether it was a relative, a teacher, the parent of a friend, someone who began to take an interest in you and who gave you a leg up in terms of turning your life around or keeping it on the right path.

All I can do is do what I do, which is to write a book that gives kids hope about dreaming for the right things, to educate themselves, to be involved citizens. I've used this book as a platform to try to deliver that message. As a platform to touch people's heart and thinking, no, I don't believe that critical thinking is the only thing in life. If you read my book, you'll see that in many places, I talk about the value of emotion in living a good and meaningful life. I say in my book that what motivated me ultimately to achieve where I am, wasn't a desire for material wealth. It wasn't a desire for fame, something that's really been thrust on me by the position I'm in.

That it was that I felt it important to live my in a way that gave back to people and so I hope you'll take the time to read my book and hear those messages and to understand that what I'm trying to do now, both in the book and on this tour and in the ways that I give back in meeting people is the very lesson you were trying to say.

Brian Lehrer: Justice Sonia Sotomayor from our 2013 interview here on the Brian Lehrer show and that ends today's Supreme Court Special.

 

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