Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Sotomayor

by Joan Biskupic

  Only in hindsight did Sotomayor understand what she and people like her were up against. “There were working poor in the projects,” she said. “There were poor poor in the projects. There were sick poor in the projects. There were addicts and non-addicts and all sorts of people, every one of them with problems, and each group with a different response, different methods of survival, different reactions to the adversity they were facing. And you saw kids making choices.”34

  At a young age she made more mature choices because of her personal health and family situation. Sotomayor won a scholarship to Cardinal Spellman High School, a majority-white Catholic school operated by the Archdiocese of New York and named for Francis Cardinal Spellman, New York’s legendary archbishop from 1939 until 1967. Soon after, Celina moved the family out of the Bronxdale projects, where drugs and gang violence were proliferating, to the new Co-op City, a housing project of thirty-five towers in the northeastern part of the Bronx. It was a safer area, with more middle-class families.

  Racial tensions were spreading beyond the Bronx and New York City. In 1968, the year Sonia started high school, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, and blacks nationwide rioted. In Washington, D.C., and Chicago, large swaths of businesses were burned, reducing neighborhoods to rubble. At Cardinal Spellman, Sotomayor became aware of herself as an individual who was part of a larger civil rights struggle. She increasingly overheard comments that referred to her as a Puerto Rican or that had the ring of “those people.”

  “Your parents let you know that you had to look out for each other,” said Charles Auffant, a Puerto Rican classmate of Sotomayor’s at Blessed Sacrament. “There was an unwritten rule of camaraderie. Puerto Ricans were still breaking in.”35

  “We were shaped by those extraordinary times and by the communities from which we came, for better or worse,” said Theodore Shaw, an African American who attended Spellman High School with Sotomayor and went on to lead the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Shaw said that Sotomayor could not be pigeonholed: “If you came from Bronxdale and performed academically as she did … you were in your own category.”36

  She mingled with white and black students, and her new Co-op City apartment became a welcoming place—like the apartment of grandmother Mercedes—for classmates to gather after school and on weekends. Young Sonia loved to cook and entertain, to be at the center of a party—a pattern that would continue well into her career years and even after she was on the bench.

  Dating presented a trickier social challenge. “It had been established that Sonia Sotomayor was not much to look at,” she wrote years later with unusual candor. “I had a pudgy nose. I was gawky and ungraceful. I barreled down the halls of Cardinal Spellman, headfirst, unlike those who knew how to amble with a sexy sashay. My own mother told me that I had terrible taste in clothes.”37 Sotomayor said it seemed she was always “everybody’s second choice” for dates.

  Yet Kevin Noonan, who came from an Irish American home, took an interest in his energetic classmate who moved easily among racial groups. Once she introduced him to her grandmother, Sotomayor’s family and friends began presuming the young couple would marry. But her family’s warmth was not reciprocated by his. “We didn’t go over to his house much,” Sotomayor recalled, “because his mother had a hard time accepting me. She wouldn’t say it to my face, but the message came through with a tightening of the lips, a slant of the eyebrow, a slam of the door. She would have been happier if I were Irish, or at least not Puerto Rican.”38

  Sotomayor was undaunted, and she pursued the relationship with Noonan. Around this same time, as she was applying to colleges, she also ignored teachers who tried to dissuade her from considering Ivy League schools. A visit to Radcliffe College, however, briefly sapped her confidence as nothing else had. It played to fundamental insecurities, perhaps originally planted by Celina, about her appearance and style.

  Sotomayor applied to Radcliffe partly out of her fascination with the 1970 romantic movie Love Story, written by Erich Segal, and partly out of her interest in winning acceptance to the best colleges. Yet in the admissions office on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus, she was confronted with everything that she was not. The woman who greeted her was flawlessly coiffed and classically dressed in a black dress and pearls. An Oriental rug, the first Sotomayor had ever seen, and a pristine white couch defined the office. Beside the woman were two small dogs, and the assault on Sotomayor’s sensibilities only increased when they began barking at her. The woman called to the dogs, and all three then sat on the couch staring at the awkward student from the Bronx. Sotomayor felt trapped in a world of ornamentation and pretense.39

  As she recalled the episode, she said she did something she had never done before. She fled. After about fifteen minutes of awkward conversation, she left the room and told the receptionist that she would not be able to meet with the students who were to escort her around campus.

  “What’s wrong?” her mother asked when she returned to their apartment in Co-op City. “You were supposed to be away for a couple of days.” Sotomayor said only that she realized she did not belong there. Neither mother nor daughter said another word about it. Perhaps Celina sensed the rejection in her daughter that she, Celina, had known in her own young life. The story would eventually become part of Sonia Sotomayor’s repertoire, marking the only time, she said, that she ran away from a challenge.

  As searing as the Radcliffe experience had been, she continued to believe she could fit in at an elite campus. She visited Yale in 1972, and although it felt better than Radcliffe, she was uncomfortable with her student guides, who were consumed with antiwar protests, the revolutionary tactics of Che Guevara, and “down with whitey” attitudes. “Whether it was due to the indeterminate color of my skin or my very determined personality, I moved easily between different worlds” of color, Sotomayor wrote.40 She was also remarkably positive about her people and own place, so much so that when, as a student, she read Oscar Lewis’s classic La Vida, tracing one family from San Juan to New York and describing the despair of its circumstances, Sotomayor said she was turned off by the pessimism.

  On the advice of a Chinese American friend who was a year ahead of her in high school and had gone to Princeton, she visited the school, which was about an hour south in New Jersey. The students seemed smart but easygoing, she said later, and to the surprise of this Bronx native, she was captivated by the Collegiate Gothic architecture and sweeping green lawns. The promise of a full financial scholarship was the final inducement.

  Soon after she applied, Sotomayor received word that she likely would be admitted. She became aware that white students with better grades were not getting in. Others noticed, too, and the reaction of the high school nurse particularly stung. She remarked to Sotomayor that these high-ranking white students were not being admitted. “They’re ahead of you. Why aren’t they getting in—and you are?” Sotomayor recalled the nurse saying. “The question was loaded with a lot of suggestion that I understood.” Sotomayor later wrote in her memoir of the school nurse’s accusatory tone toward her, “My perplexed discomfort under her baleful gaze was clearly not enough; shame was the response she seemed to want from me.”41

  Before she left for college, Sotomayor saw a movie that similarly touched her sense of identity: 12 Angry Men, the Sidney Lumet classic depicting tensions among jurors as they decide the fate of a young Latino murder defendant. More than a decade after the original 1957 release of the film, she watched it with her boyfriend Kevin Noonan.

  Set at a time when men wore white shirts and thin ties and often had a cigarette between their fingers, the movie opens with the trial judge’s charge to the twelve-man jury in the case of a youth accused of stabbing his father to death. The jurors learn that if the kid from the slums is found guilty, he will get the electric chair. In the jury room, the first vote is 11–1 to convict, with only the juror played by Henry Fonda saying he is not sure the youth did it. “We’re talking about somebody�
�s life here,” he says, imploring the rest of the jurors to discuss what they’ve seen and heard rather than vote quickly, try to get it all over with, and go on with their lives. Over the course of the next ninety minutes the audience sees how prejudices play out and what “reasonable doubt” means. As the discussion in the stifling-hot jury room continues and doubts are raised, the men who want to convict make remarks such as “You know how these people lie,” “These people are dangerous,” and “Slums are breeding grounds for criminals.” The film ends when the remaining holdout for conviction, played angrily by Lee J. Cobb, changes his mind and votes for acquittal.

  When Sotomayor watched the movie as a young woman, she said she was struck by the idea that justice could prevail, and it would reinforce her choice of a career in the law. Yet she was also deeply affected by the references to “those people.” Such words, she said, made her flinch.

  “You have to flinch,” she said years later after she had seen the movie again. “Those [references] are personal. They were personal when I saw it the first time. I had heard about ‘those people’ in my life so often.”42

  THREE

  “I Am the Perfect Affirmative Action Baby”

  Sonia Sotomayor suspected that Princeton University would be challenging, but she had no idea what she would face when she arrived on campus in 1972. Her admittance to the Ivy League school changed the way people regarded her and her family. “I have to tell you, Sonia,” her mother had confided, “at the hospital I’m being treated like a queen right now. Doctors who have never once had a nice word for me, who have never spoken to me at all, have come up to congratulate me.” Celina presciently added, “What you got yourself into, daughter, I don’t know. But we’re going to find out.”1

  Sotomayor had graduated near the top of her class at the competitive Cardinal Spellman High School, had smoothed out some of the rougher edges of childhood, and thought she was ready for Princeton. She was wrong. During the first weeks of school she spent most of her time in her dorm room and reverted to the shyness and doubt of her early grade school years. But in what would become an enduring pattern, she confronted her shortcomings, kindled her ambitions, and developed a strategy to get where she wanted to go.

  When she discovered the holes in her Bronx education, she turned to professors for help. She made friends and built networks. By the time she graduated, she had earned some of Princeton’s top honors, but she never tried to emulate the polish or personal reserve of her more advantaged classmates.

  Years later, when the magazine Mademoiselle looked at what had become of women who excelled at top colleges in the mid-1970s, it opened the feature story with Sotomayor. The reporter describes her telephone interview on a Friday night, minutes before midnight, just as Sotomayor has gotten home from the office. “Do you mind terribly if I eat my dinner while we talk?” Sotomayor asks. “I’m a diabetic, and I haven’t eaten since noon.” Later in the conversation, she reveals that she has just given herself an insulin shot. “I work hard and I play hard,” she says. “That’s the way I am.”2

  Sotomayor worked hard to overcome her deficiencies, the doubts of others, and her own insecurities. Decades later she would be defensive about her achievements as some critics asserted that she succeeded only because of affirmative action. Such attitudes reflected the enduring dilemma of race and ethnicity in America, and the stigma was real.

  In the early 1970s it was remarkable that this child of Puerto Rican parents had even enrolled in college, let alone at an Ivy League school. When she started her studies at Princeton, only about 10 percent of all Hispanics between the ages of eighteen and twenty were attending college.3 But she was riding a wave of change. The civil rights upheaval of the 1960s that she witnessed in the Bronx had raised awareness among government officials nationwide. They perceived the needs of racial minorities as well as the political potential in cultivating a Latino constituency.

  President John F. Kennedy launched federal initiatives giving minorities a boost in 1961 with an executive order requiring government contractors to take “affirmative action” to ensure that they did not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, color, or national origin. President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed further by seeking passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and mandating that federal contractors recruit, hire, and promote more minorities.

  In 1965, as Johnson was about to sign the historic Executive Order 11246 implementing affirmative action, he laid out his views in a commencement speech at Howard University in Washington, D.C. “Freedom is not enough,” he said in the June address to the predominantly black graduating class.

  You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.4

  President Johnson was speaking of the black experience, yet his words could easily have applied to Sotomayor and other Hispanics. “Equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough,” he said. “Men and women of all races are born with the same range of abilities. But ability is not just the product of birth. Ability is stretched or stunted by the family that you live with, and the neighborhood you live in—by the school you go to and the poverty or the richness of your surroundings. It is the product of a hundred unseen forces playing upon the little infant, the child, and finally the man.”5

  President Richard Nixon picked up where the Johnson administration left off. In 1972, the year Sotomayor entered Princeton, the U.S. secretary of labor ordered an increase in the representation of racial and ethnic minorities on campuses. “Almost all leading colleges and professional schools came to believe that they had a role to play in educating minority students,” wrote William Bowen and Derek Bok, former presidents of Princeton and Harvard, in The Shape of the River. “Often spurred by student protests on their own campuses, university officials … [took] race into account in the admissions process by accepting qualified black students even if they had lower grades and test scores than white students.” Bowen and Bok said that administrators adopted the policies for traditionally academic reasons: to enrich the education of all students with diversity and to enhance the ability of minorities to become leaders in business and government.6

  At the same time, universities and other public entities had to answer to whites who believed they were shut out because of racial policies. Critics argued that affirmative action led to the selection of unprepared minorities and promoted a race consciousness when the country should be moving toward a color-blind society. Sotomayor would experience the backlash, but she would also benefit from affirmative action more often than not.

  During Jimmy Carter’s presidency, the recruitment of minorities for the federal judiciary became a national priority. Carter selected an unprecedented number of women, blacks, and Hispanics for federal courts.7 His appointments to the powerful appellate tier of the federal judiciary, directly below the Supreme Court, offered new opportunities to blacks and Latinos in particular: 16.1 percent of his appointees for U.S. courts of appeals were black, and 3.6 percent were Hispanic. Neither Ford nor Nixon had put any blacks or Hispanics on the appeals courts.8

  Reynaldo Guerra Garza, a Mexican American, was the first Hispanic appointed to a U.S. court at any level. President Kennedy named him to a district court in Texas in 1961. President Carter elevated Garza to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in 1979.

  At the Supreme Court, President Johnson had made history in 1967 with the appointment of the first black justice, Thurgood Marshall, a former appeals court judge who was serving as U.S. solicitor general. The great-grandson of a slave, Marshall was known nationally for taking the lead in litig
ation against school segregation that culminated in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending the doctrine of “separate but equal.” Born and reared in Baltimore, Marshall, the son of a railroad porter and schoolteacher, devoted his life to helping the poor and disenfranchised. He graduated from Howard University School of Law and became the chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

  Marshall not only steered the litigation strategy that successfully challenged school segregation, he also shepherded cases against racially restrictive housing covenants and whites-only election primaries. In his public interest work and as a government lawyer, he argued thirty-two cases before the Supreme Court. When President Johnson announced the nomination on June 13, 1967, he said of Marshall, “He is the best qualified by training and by very valuable service to the country. I believe it is the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place.”9 For the shrewd Johnson, Marshall’s nomination was also the politically right move, and it completed a groundbreaking series of initiatives on behalf of minorities, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Still, when Marshall appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for vetting, he was subjected to racial humiliation, most notably from South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, who asked Marshall to name the members of Congress who, in 1866, drafted the language for the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the law.10 The Senate confirmed Marshall by a 69–11 vote. All those who voted against him were Southerners.11

  * * *

  Five years after Marshall’s appointment, Sotomayor entered Princeton, behind her classmates both academically and socially. As a high school student, she had rarely strayed from the Bronx, in contrast to her Princeton classmates who attended prep schools and went off on ski trips and traveled Europe for adventure. Princeton, often called the “northernmost college for Southern gentlemen,” did not admit women until 1969. It also was known for its exclusive eating clubs, which did not go fully coed until 1991—only after a lawsuit by women students forced the issue.