Legal champion: Blake A. Strode, ArchCity Defenders

ArchCity Defenders, the St. Louis-based civil rights law firm, marked its 10th anniversary in November 2019.

As its staff and supporters looked back at its milestones of the past decade, they pointed to the contributions of Blake A. Strode as essential to many of those legal victories.

Strode became executive director of ArchCity in 2018, three years after joining the firm through a Skadden Fellowship.

His nominator points to numerous ArchCity initiatives since then in which he has been or continues to be a driving force.

Strode helped to establish the civil rights litigation unit at ArchCity, which has challenged a variety of unlawful and predatory practices, including debtors’ prisons, police misconduct and inhumane jail conditions, among others.

With his colleagues, he’s filed more than 50 civil rights cases in state and federal court, affecting more than 40,000 people in the St. Louis region. He also played a significant role in the class-action debtors’ prison case against the City of Jennings that reached final settlement in December 2016, providing injunctive and declaratory relief, and awarding $4.75 million in damages to the class of wrongfully jailed individuals. That case was among the first to challenge practices of jailing people for unpaid court debts.

“I think the work that feels really meaningful is the work that is done in partnership — that is part of a collective building of power and of narrative and understanding — and I see a lot of that work happening in St. Louis, particularly post-Ferguson,” said Strode, a St. Louis native.

One of the endeavors he said he’s most gratified to be part of is the Close the Workhouse campaign, a multi-organization effort aimed at forcing St. Louis city leaders to shut down the Medium Security Institution jail on Hall Street. The primary organizations involved are Action St. Louis, ArchCity Defenders and Bail Project St. Louis.

“That’s something that I am incredibly proud of because I think it has lasting impact, and I see the ways in which those spaces have become spaces of leadership development and empowerment for the people that we serve — meaning the membership of a campaign like that is made up of people we represent,” he said.

As far back as he can remember, Strode wanted to be two things when he grew up: a professional tennis player and a lawyer. After playing professional tennis for a few years, he went on to graduate from Harvard Law School in 2015.

“I always saw myself at some point becoming a lawyer, I think, because I’m passionate about advocacy, and I always understood that lawyers could play a role in fighting important fights,” he said. “I grew up in a household in which we learned and spoke a lot about the history of the black freedom struggle in particular and the civil rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s.”

Strode said he wanted to become an important part of that history.

“When I got to law school, I gained a very different understanding of the legal profession and the legal practice,” he said, laughing. He went through a period of disillusionment, he said, believing that so much of what he was learning and discussing was distant from the reality of so many people’s lives and the problems of the world.

“The saving grace for me, at least, was one — there was a community of people who were similarly interested in a different kind of approach to what legal practice could be, and it was in kind of finding that community that I was introduced to really important work happening both there in Boston . . .  and around the country,” he said.

Ultimately he found ArchCity Defenders doing the kind of work he wanted to do in his hometown.

2020 awards: About | Honorees | Publisher’s Letter | Media | Digital Edition | Store