On or about January 15, 2020, Marilyn Mosby received a threatening voicemail message from an unknown assailant after offering her support to St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner for a complaint she filed against the city of St. Louis alleging racial discrimination and violations of the Ku Klux Klan Act. Several other female state and circuit attorneys gathered in St. Louis along with Mosby in support of Gardner.
The assailant railed against Mosby shouting, “How dare you come to St. Louis and say you’ve got to back that lousy b**** State’s Attorney Kim Gardner? You do everything you can to give all the blacks who are criminals every benefit of a doubt.”
Continuing on her hateful rant the unknown woman declared, “Black lives only matter when a white person takes it. You blacks can kill each other all you want, in fact, I think that’s the grand solution. We need to start driving around the ghetto and dropping boxes of bullets on every street corner and let them take each other out.”
The unknown assailant ended the call by telling Mosby, “If we’d known you all were going to be this much f—–g trouble, we would have picked our own f—–g cotton.”
In response to the hate speech, Mosby responded on her Twitter account stating, “This is why #IStandWithKimGardner and this hateful rhetoric only strengthens my resolve to continue fighting for justice and working to undo the blight of mass incarceration and its impact on communities of color. #KeepersOfTheStatusQuo.”
The National Bar Association Young Lawyers Division stands in solidarity with Marilyn Mosby in deriding this racially motivated attack. The NBA-YLD maintains that only through compassion, understanding and a will for peace and justice can this country heal from the wounds of racial oppression, bigotry and the other “isms” that plague us.
The National Bar Association Young Lawyers Division is a Division of the National Bar Association. The YLD serves the interest of lawyers of color under 40 years of age. Statements expressed by the YLD are reflective of our membership, but in no way, shape or form bind the National Bar Association. For an official opinion on this, or any other matter, please contact the National Bar Association at 202.842.3900 or communications@nationalbar.org
