Keisha Hudson looks to the law to empower people

Keisha Hudson takes a spring break in the Willard Straight Rock Garden. Charles Harrington/University Photography

By Linda Myers

A small, close-knit community is one of life's essentials, according to Keisha Hudson. She grew up in one, the seaside fishing village of Sav La Mar in Westmoreland, Jamaica, and when she was 15 and moved with her family to New York City, she brought along with her the sense that community was important.

So when she first looked at Cornell, it wasn't surprising that she was attracted to the Department of City and Regional Planning in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning because of its small size. Choosing urban and regional studies as a major, she was able to parlay her interest in community into a program of study in which she learned how communities can empower themselves to solve common problems.

"It has been a great experience and great training for community development," said Hudson. A stellar student, she made the dean's list for four semesters, won a Cornell award for academic excellence and was inducted into the urban studies honors program. A favorite course was Professor John Forester's Community Mediation and Dispute Resolution. "It was practical and practice oriented," she said. "We talked about real cases and how we'd solve them."

A summer job as an organizer for the New Party in Chicago "was the best decision I ever made," she said, "because I got to put into practice some of what I was learning in urban studies." The New Party was seeking community support for a proposal that would ensure that employees of companies with city contracts were paid a living wage. Hudson's job was to knock on doors, talk with people in the 29th Ward and gain their involvement. Chicago, with its heritage of boss politics, is notoriously difficult to organize, she said, but the hard work paid off; Hudson and her fellow organizers succeeded in getting the minimum wage raised for 3,000 Chicago workers.

Hudson's other volunteer work includes an internship with the Human Rights Commission in Ithaca and involvement in the Ordinary People Drama Troupe on campus, which writes and performs skits that shed light on racist, sexist and homophobic behavior and other forms of bigotry.

Hudson also was among the students who protested last year when a College of Arts and Sciences proposal surfaced to merge various ethnic studies programs under one roof. "This campus has a strong activist foundation that I've thrived in," she said. "One of the reasons I'm glad I came to Cornell is it has provided me with a forum to speak out on issues where I never had a voice before."

Hudson, who will attend law school after Cornell, was an intern for the Legal Aid Society in Washington, D.C., while attending the Cornell-in-Washington program. The experience of interviewing clients, filing cases and serving subpoenas in a busy office that handled mostly child custody cases was an eye opener and made her realize she would not be happy practicing family law. Instead she wants to work for a more just society and help people empower themselves by pursuing a career in public-interest law.

Hudson's outlook remains hopeful and altruistic, she says, in part because of her upbringing. "I was raised in a wonderful, warm, nurturing environment and taught the difference between wrong and right," she related. "Although my family wasn't political, I was told that I had to do my part in making sure people aren't victimized."