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Dores McCree meant a lot of things to a lot of people at Michigan Law. As we all know, during her 18 years with the Law School (from 1988-96), Mrs. McCree offered unwavering support and encouragement to scores of students, particularly students of color. During my time there (1993-96), her dedication to our activist efforts helped empower us to attempt to make institutional changes at the Law School. Those of us, for example, who helped found the Michigan Journal of Race & Law in the mid-1990s know first-hand that the Journal simply would not have come into existence without Mrs. McCree's singular and steadfast support. In fact, for a long time, it often felt like outside of our classmates and coconspirators, Mrs. McCree alone believed in us. As we worked toward making the Journal a reality, she always held us "in the light."1 This faith in us was not only instrumental to the success of our project, it also exemplified Mrs. McCree's general optimism and dedication to social equality both within and without the institution.
Because this is a tribute, I also want to comment on why I am additionally and more personally indebted to Mrs. McCree. I can say with a fair amount of certainty that without her, I very well may not have made it through law school. As was the case for some of us who had never really been exposed to lawyers or the legal profession (there were no lawyers in my family or family's circle of friends), the first year of law school nearly broke me down. I remember sitting in my first-year classes, listening to my classmates as they engaged in Socratic colloquy with our professors, and thinking, "Are we reading the same thing? What am I missing here? Why are the things that I think are important in these cases not considered relevant in our classroom discussions?" I did not "love the law" during that first year of law school. In fact, at the time I rather hated it because I had not yet assimilated its rhetoric and did not yet understand its internal structure and its discursive power. I didn't know what I was doing and was at a loss as to how to figure it...