Crump is the go-to civil-rights attorney for families who have lost a loved one to police violence; he is often referred to as “the black Gloria Allred.”. In 2012, after Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman, in a suburb of Orlando, Martin’s family hired Crump, who is based in Tallahassee, to represent them.
Crump is one of the lawyers for the family of Ahmaud Arbery, the black jogger who was killed by two white men in Georgia, in February. It was only after a video of the shooting went viral that the two men were arrested, seventy-four days after the murder.
(Zimmerman was eventually acquitted.) Two years later, Crump took on another high-profile case, after Michael Brown was shot dead by Darren Wilson, a police officer, in Ferguson, Missouri.
A couple of months before George Floyd was murdered, Breonna Taylor, a young E.M.T. in Louisville, Kentucky, was shot at least eight times by the police during a raid at her home. The cops who killed Taylor haven’t been arrested. They haven’t even been fired. But Crump’s working on it.
The leader of the effort to establish an integrated (official) bar was Judge Jeremiah F. Sull ivan, who first proposed the concept at the CBA's Santa Barbara convention in September 1917, and provided the CBA with a copy of a Quebec statute as a model.
By October 1, 1927, 7,872 lawyers had registered. These lawyers then voted by mail for the State Bar's first Board of Governors. On November 17, the State Bar held a preorganization dinner at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, followed by the formal organization meeting the next day.
Without such annual reauthorization, it can charge California lawyers only $77 per year.
It took almost ten years to establish an integrated bar in California. Sullivan, who was also the President of the Bar Association of San Francisco, organized BASF committees to draft and propose appropriate legislation. Both BASF-drafted bills died in the California Legislature, in 1919 and 1921.
The same day, Dunn filed a whistle-blower lawsuit against the State Bar challenging the termination because he had exposed malfeasance and "egregious improprieties." The State Bar denied Dunn's allegations, saying the "Board received a complaint from a high-level employee raising serious, wide-ranging allegations about ... Dunn and certain State Bar employees." The lawsuit was eventually diverted into arbitration, and in March 2017, the arbitrator rejected Dunn's claims and exonerated the State Bar for his firing.
On May 12, 1927, the Supreme Court of California appointed the State Bar Commission, which in turn established the State Bar of California as an operating entity with offices at 519 California Street in San Francisco on July 30, 1927.
The State Bar of California is the largest in the United States, with over 279,000 living members as of November 2019, of whom over 192,000 are on active status. It is headquartered in San Francisco, with a branch office in Los Angeles . The State Bar's main office in San Francisco is housed on several floors of this office building.