Florida's Fighter

Orlando FL

10 July, 2021

4:39 PM

Description

By Sarah Kinbar, VoxPopuli Friday, July 9, 2021 It was a sticky September day, and civil rights attorney Cecile Scoon was out in front of the Chapman Early Education Center in Panama City, urging people to register to vote ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. Organized by Bay County's League of Women Voters and the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority — which not only claims Scoon as a member, but also Vice President Kamala Harris — the event was part of National Voter Registration Day, a country-wide, nonpartisan push to educate people about voting and to register as many people as possible. While she got plenty of brush-offs that day from people convinced "voting doesn't matter" and "my vote won't count," Scoon was undeterred. She zeroed in on a family with a young child. "I asked them if they were pleased with the program at Chapman, and they loved it," she recalled in a recent phone interview with VoxPopuli. Their enthusiasm gave Scoon the opening she was looking for to convince them to register to vote. "They had no idea they were paying well-below market rate because the program was subsidized. I told them, You're paying $100 per week instead of $400 because people voted to allot tax dollars for this program." Just as Scoon hoped, the parents registered on the spot. "That's what it takes for most people — evidence that voting can impact them directly. They registered to vote because their child was benefitting." Scoon, 61, has put in decades at events like these, doggedly finding the thing that matters to people and convincing them that voting will make a difference in their lives. Passionate, driven and "really direct," Scoon is a master at reading the proverbial room: what is it about the environment she is in, with this person, in that moment, that offers clues to strike up a conversation and allow her to make her case for registering to vote. "Paying attention to the details comes into play whether I'm in the courtroom or out in the field educating prospective voters," she said. And now she has a statewide audience. "Voting is the basic building block of our prized democracy," Scoon said when she made history last month as the first Black woman elected president of the League of Women Voters of Florida. The election took place in Tallahassee, at the League's biannual state convention. Scoon, the past-president of the League of Women Voters chapter where she lives in Bay County, had served as first vice president for the 101-year-old civic organization for two years before her barrier-breaking win. "League members repudiated times in the 1920s and later in the 1960s when white League members were not as welcoming to Black women," said Scoon in a news release after her election. "My election was a rejection of that troubling past and an embracement of diversity, equity and inclusivity." A huge epiphany At the same time that Scoon was reconciling America's Jim Crow past with her parents' lives, students on college campuses across the country were demonstrating against South Africa's apartheid system. Scoon joined the student protests at Harvard, pushing the university to divest its holdings in corporations that supported South Africa. "A lot of students were incensed that Harvard, this bastion of learning and intellect where we don't care what people look like, invested in that place," she said. Sitting in on board of trustees meetings, she listened as the trustees and the lawyers' wrangled over the university's stocks, the legalese flying past her. "We were like What are they saying? I said, You know what? There will never be another time in my life where lawyers sit and talk and I'm not going to understand," she told MyPanhandle. That was the moment Scoon decided she was going to law school. "I thought You need to be a lawyer and you need to be a civil rights lawyer. Because myself and everyone I know have benefitted off the backs of people we didn't know," she said. "I was like O.M.G.! I will never walk away from my history." After earning her law degree from University of Virginia Law School, Scoon spent five years as an active duty Air Force judge advocate general, at Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City, prosecuting courts-martial, before she could turn her attention to civil rights cases. Focusing on employment discrimintion, Scoon largely taught herself how to practice civil rights law. "I learned the hard way. There were no other civil rights lawyers in the town for me to talk to," she recalled. "I'd call the NAACP in New York and I'd send them my complaints and say Is this right? They'd say, Yeah, that looks good. Then off I'd go to federal court." On the spot Thanks for submitting! VoxPopuli is a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering politics, government and social justice issues that impact Winter Garden, Ocoee, Oakland and Windermere, Florida.