Meeting Dr. McCree

This past week I talked to Dr. Elizabeth McCree, a lawyer and an adjunct professor at Andrews who is very involved in social justice work in the area. For any students who are interested in law school or criminal justice, her advice is very helpful and encouraging! Her passion for her work is also inspiring and it’s exciting to see what classes and school events she will be involved with in the future.

Can you introduce yourself and what you do here?
I have been back in the area (Benton Harbor) since 2015 and I started my own law firm at that time. And it was in 2015 that I first was contacted by Dr. Desmond Murray, who's in the chemistry department at Andrews and asked me to be a part of the community engagement council for Andrews. I was very surprised by how big the campus was and how diverse the student population was. I met the outgoing president and provost when they were first coming in around that time, and really just enjoyed meeting both of them and their ideas about education. Many years later I met Dr. Carpenter in the Political Science and History Department—after I met her, she came back to me two years ago and asked if I would teach criminal law. I am also a practicing attorney and I've been practicing law for 15 years—but while I was practicing law in Georgia, I also received my master's degree in history. I'll be teaching a history course coming up this fall, and I'm very, very excited about doing that as well. The large bulk of what I do is working with kids in foster care and kids with delinquency charges but I've done the gamut. I was a prosecutor and defense attorney; I've done everything from traffic offenses to death penalty cases in the past fifteen years.

What is the class that you're going to be teaching next semester? I heard it focuses on the African diaspora.
Yes, that's the focus of my master's degree. I went to Spelman College for undergrad in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s an HBCU, all female institution, and all of us had to take an African diaspora class for the entire first year that we were there. And so I think a lot of it, as I'm formulating it, is going to be modeled from what we call ADW, African Diaspora in the World. I'm really excited about the opportunity to bring that—I always think about the moments that changed my life when I took that course as a freshman in college and so I want to recreate that experience and understanding for all of you. The world is very different than when I was a freshman in college in 2001, and there's a lot of access to information. But I think even then we still don't know the full history and stories of important people, so I want to bring some of those stories as well as some history of African people from Africa into the class. We have to think about the fact that people of African descent live literally everywhere on every continent.

That's so cool. I really appreciate that you’re taking the time to talk about the kind of history that isn’t taught super extensively in a lot of schools.
There are so many stories, you know. One of my teachers at Spelman was Martin Luther King's older sister, and she's an amazing human being. She asked us, “Who organized the March on Washington?” and we were like, “Your brother?” And she said, “And who else?” She really taught us about all the other people who were involved; she taught us about all the women in the movement who went unnoticed. My mother grew up in segregated Arkansas, my father grew up on a plantation, and my grandparents were sharecroppers, so this is history that is not too distant—it seeps into everywhere that we are in this agricultural area.

When you're working as a lawyer, you said you focus mostly on kids’ cases, right? So what led you to focus in that area of law when you've done so many different kinds?
I was about 10 years old when I first decided to be a lawyer, but when I really started planning in high school, I was going to be a federal prosecutor on human trafficking cases. I decided that when two different things happened: there was a trafficking case that happened in Benton Harbor during my freshman or sophomore year of high school, and also “Law and Order: SVU” premiered at the time. But I kept finding myself getting drawn back to working with kids, even though I didn't really know that the kind of law that I do now really existed. When I was a prosecutor in Georgia, I volunteered to fill in in juvenile court, and I had done an internship in juvenile court in DeKalb County, Georgia. When I moved to Michigan, the spot that was opened in the prosecutor's office in Muskegon was in juvenile court. I would also go with the probation department one day a week and play basketball with the boys who were on probation so that they got to know me. I quit practicing law around three times in my 20s and early 30s, but now that I've opened my own firm, the bulk of my work represents children in foster care, and it’s really come full circle. I've had kids who I've represented for five, six, seven years and I’ve gotten to see them grow up. They know that they can still contact me as young adults and I’m able to be that consistent person in their life. It's really difficult to hear the horrible things that kids go through but I do think that in the end, this is what I was supposed to be doing. God just kind of brought me back saying, you're not going to quit practicing law like this.

So, between teaching law at our college and also being a practicing attorney, what would you say are your long term goals or motivations in pursuing activism?
My plan and goal is to create a firm that uses a social work model so that the cases that we handle will have an attorney assigned, a social worker assigned and an investigator assigned. Just really this idea of being more holistic and helping families that will hopefully be a representation of children and other people because a lot of what I see are people who have to go through the system unrepresented. So one of those big groups are grandparents raising their grandchildren, who get caught up in the foster care system when they don't necessarily need to be. I also want to do some more innovative things like pre-birth mediation so that we can have a plan before the baby comes, doing more collaborative parenting and also focusing on the elderly population. Having that holistic model I think will just help build better families. As far as teaching, I definitely want to teach more as well. It's been very invigorating for me to see young people who want to go into the practice of law and are honestly doing it with a much clearer mind than I did. As far as self care, my first couple of years of practice I was a machine, a trial machine. There were times I would have four or five trials and misdemeanors in a week. Now I see students asking guest speakers about self care and things like that, so they're changing the way that we see the practice of law through the young people who are going to come up and go to law school. The other big thing that I want to do in Andrews is grow the mock trial program and have us competing. I think that so many of the students who I have encountered are just really bright and will really do well on a national stage. So that's another thing I would like to see in the next couple of years.

What is some advice that you would give for people who are maybe considering or already decided that they want to go into law in the future?
Well, I teach at least one Legal Studies course every semester, so even if you're not a legal studies student at this time, taking one of the classes if you have the availability for it is a way to get introduced to some of the concepts of it. I was a political science major in undergrad but I had like every minor on campus at some point because I was interested in so many things. And the truth of the matter is you can be any major and go to law school. One of the top students in my law school class was a ballet performance major in Indiana University, and the discipline I think that comes with ballet and the level at which he did it translated perfectly to the discipline that he needed to do well in law school. It's really more of having an interest and then having the discipline that you would need to to get through a law school curriculum. Anybody who's interested should start with just taking the Legal Studies course or a law based course and see if it's something that may interest you.

Okay, lastly, how do you manage to balance your time between doing so many things? You work not only as a professor and lawyer, but also with various committees you’re involved in. And so how do you juggle all that?
It's a work in progress. And I think that I'm being honest about that now in a way that I have not been before because just like I said that I learned a lot from you all the students as far as the need for self care and other things of that nature. I found out that internalizing the trauma that I see every day in my cases was affecting me even though it wasn't necessarily happening to me. When you see kids all day who have been traumatized it traumatizes you and so having that self care is important. I've had to learn how to say no to a lot of different things, at one point I was probably on 10 different boards and committees at the same time. It is a work in progress too, because when I was your age, the term self care didn’t really exist. There was no discussion of that, so I'm learning to do that in the midst of my career. And I honestly think that's part of the reason why I quit being a lawyer and came back so many times, I wasn't looking at how to balance things and you just become worn out. I think that for me saying no, and focusing on the things that bring me some joy like teaching is a form of self care. It's still hard work, you have to be prepared and ready to teach the next generation but it is something that brings me joy.