When A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. was just 17, he started college. When Robert Saleem Holbrook was just 17, he started a life sentence in prison for a crime he committed when he was 16.
Higginbotham went on to become chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, an adjunct professor at Penn and an international civil rights champion.
Holbrook went on to spend the next 27 years in prison, including 10 years in solitary confinement. It wasn’t until 2018, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled life sentences for minors unconstitutional, that Holbrook was released.
In a fitting crossing of paths, Holbrook thinks about Higginbotham every time he comes to work at Penn Carey Law School, where he passes Higginbotham’s portrait on his way to teach a course in Community Lawyering and the Fight to End Mass Incarceration.
“There’s a long hallway and, as at many universities, there are so many portraits of old White men,” he says. “One day I was walking down the hall and was like Damn, who is this guy with the ’fro and the brown skin? I looked closer, and it said Justice Higginbotham. Here was a man I’d learned so much about for his commitment to protecting people’s civil rights.”
“I didn’t have to go to law school to know that life without parole was unjust.” — Robert Saleem Holbrook
Holbrook is now executive director of the Abolitionist Law Center (ALC), a 10-year-old public interest law firm working to dismantle the carceral state as we know it and raise awareness about the injustices of so many of our public systems. The ALC emerged from advocacy started by the Human Rights Coalition, an organization Holbrook co-founded while incarcerated, along with other people in solitary confinement and their families on the outside. Bret Grote, ALC’s Legal Director, had been a member of HRC’s Pittsburgh Chapter since 2008. He and Holbrook started corresponding when Holbrook was incarcerated at SCI-Greene, which is 45 minutes from Pittsburgh.
Holbrook was released on February 20, 2018. His first day at ALC was March 1, working as a paralegal and community organizer.
For his commitment to social justice, Holbrook is The Citizen’s first-ever recipient of the A. Leon Higginbotham Social Justice Champion of the Year Award. Holbrook, along with 10 other astounding Philadelphians, will be honored at a celebration on January 30 where MSNBC’s Ali Velshi will hold a conversation with actor/activist George Takei about the critical importance of civic participation.
A calling for life
“Justice Higginbotham and I have very different vantage points, but we were/are both focused on protecting people’s civil rights,” Holbrook says. “I’m using the tools of this system to liberate people, to lessen and weaken police powers. And he was using the system to try and help from the inside as much as he could to protect people’s civil rights.”
Lauren Fine, co-founder of Philly’s Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project (YSRP) and now Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and the Supervising Attorney of the Criminal Defense Clinic at Duke Law School, worked on Holbrook’s Mitigation Report and says she was was honored to partner with him on his case, and on advocacy and policy reform in his role at ALC.
Fine first knew Holbrook only through her friendship with his sister, Anita, who tirelessly fought for his freedom — and others like him. Then she got to know him on his own.
“During those many years when he was incarcerated, Saleem impressed me with his intelligence, empathy, keen insights into our justice and carceral systems and the ways they oppress people. He understood the larger context and always connected his own struggle with historic and contemporary movements for freedom and justice,” she says.
Once he came home, Holbrook — unsurprisingly, Fine says — continued his fight for human rights. “He has been a teacher and a friend to me, and so…
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