Black Bar Association continues mission to be a 'stepping stone for a new generation'

J. Stewart Moore was 12 the first time he walked into a courtroom.

His sister, then a college student, had gotten a ticket for speeding in their late father’s Pontiac LeMans and Moore was there as a show of support. He said he was surprised to find the judge was Black.

Surprised, Moore recalled this week, because it was 1969 and racial tensions were running high across America. Surprised, Moore said, because his father — who worked as a waiter in New York City to raise six children in suburban Huntington Station — had pushed his son to become a lawyer. And, until that moment, Moore said he hadn’t considered it possible.

"I knew there were Black judges, I knew there were Black lawyers," Moore said. "But I also knew there weren’t many."

Moore would become one of the founding members of Amistad, the Long Island Black Bar Association representing Black lawyers in Nassau and Suffolk, in 1996. The organization, which now has more than 400 members, is named for the notorious Spanish schooner at the center of the 1839 revolt by enslaved Africans whose fight for freedom sparked an international legal battle and debate over slavery. The ship was eventually apprehended by the U.S. Navy near Montauk Point.

Since 1996, the organization has helped mentor and assist not only generations of Black attorneys on Long Island, but also helped open doors in the legal field. Moore said those efforts have led to representation among not just attorneys, but court officers, court clerks, judicial referees, magistrates and judges in both counties.

"We didn’t intend on it being political, per se," Moore said. "But we did understand that judgeships, that jobs in the court system, were political — and that representation, that inclusion, was important, and having an organization to help develop lawyers not only of color but of appropriate practice, cognizant of the highest standard possible, was how to do so."

As Tamika N. Hardy, a partner at the Uniondale-based branch of Rivkin Radler LLP, the largest law firm on Long Island, said of the association: "I think it definitely has had a great impact of raising the issues of visibility and inclusion, and that is reflected in the increase in the number of judges — and of diversity in the court system — on Long Island. . . . I think we will continue to provide a stepping stone for a new generation of attorneys of color."

Both Hardy and Moore are past presidents of Amistad, and Moore is married to another founder of the organization, Victoria Gumbs-Moore, who in 2020 became the first Black woman elected as a Family Court judge in Suffolk.

Moore recalled this week that the judge who presided over his sister’s case that morning in traffic court was Marquette L. Floyd, who rose from childhood poverty in the Jim Crow South to become the first Black judge elected to the bench in Suffolk in 1969.

Last fall, the Suffolk County Supreme Court building was named for Floyd, who retired in 2002 and died in December 2020 at age 92.

"I remember he was not easy on her," Moore said of Floyd’s ruling on that speeding ticket. "My sister had to pay the fine. And she got a lecture. He was as stern as my parents would have been."