Justice & Law Quote by Leah Ward Sears

There is a quiet audacity in deciding, as a Black child, to make the Supreme Court your North Star. Sears is naming a generation-defining reality: for African-Americans, “important changes” were often not delivered by presidents’ speeches or Congress’s bargains, but by courts that could reorder daily life with a paragraph and a vote. The line frames civil rights less as a moral awakening than as a procedural battlefield, won through briefs, doctrine, and the slow machinery of precedent.

Her phrasing does two jobs at once. “Were being made” carries both gratitude and warning: rights arrived through institutions that are powerful, distant, and not necessarily stable. The Supreme Court is cast as an engine of change, but also as a gatekeeper; if lawyers can move history, then history is vulnerable to the lawyers who argue it and the justices who hear it. That’s the subtext behind “followed the court very intensely” - not fandom, but vigilance. For communities who’ve watched legal status swing between inclusion and exclusion, attention is a survival skill.

The quote also slips in a personal origin story that’s political without announcing itself as such. Sears isn’t saying she wanted prestige; she wanted leverage. Coming of age in the long shadow of Brown, the Voting Rights Act era, and the backlash cycles that followed, she stakes a claim for law as public service with teeth. It’s a blueprint for how minority ambition can be shaped by institutions that once excluded them: learn the rules, enter the room, and become one of the people who writes what “change” legally means.