Judge McDonald-Kemp urge tolerance during King event
DONORA – Judge Traci McDonald-Kemp took a seat in the back of a Washington County courtroom the first time she appeared there as a young prosecutor.
Someone then instructed her that the defendants sit in the front of the courtroom, McDonald-Kemp recalled Monday when she spoke in Donora about her life and Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy.
McDonald-Kemp said she was quick to say she was there as an assistant county district attorney, a position she would hold for 14 years.
She said after the civil rights leader’s call for doors to be open to everyone ‘it looked like I was the epitome of Dr. King’s dream.”
But it reality, she grew up in Washington within walking distance to a public pool in which she wasn’t permitted to swim because of her skin color.
She said the parents of her white friends wouldn’t allow them to go to a African-American community center in the city because they were afraid.
“I never understood what the danger was,” McDonald-Kemp said at Donora Public Library.
McDonald-Kemp was the first African-American female elected to a judicial post when she was elected a district judge in 2015 in a district in the Cecil area that wasn’t diverse.
She said she wondered on the campaign trail then if people would “see my color before they see my character.”
She would conclude 99% of people are good, that she needed to listen to their concerns in order to win them over.
“Once I understood them they (saw) me,” she said.
McDonald-Kemp also became the first female African-American judge in the county when she was appointed to the bench last year by Gov. Tom Wolf before winning the November election for the seat.
She said she wondered what King would think today of social media where many express anger and others get lost in an echo chamber without showing tolerance.
“We put blinders on and close our ears to what we don’t agree with,” she said. “People are quick to attack and so, so slow to listen.”
She said she suspects that King would have embraced social media in order to get his message out quicker and to a wider audience.
“King would want you to be tolerant,” she said.