Grif Stockley

SEARCHING FOR JUSTIFICATION
Griffin Jasper Stockley, Jr., was born October 9, 1944, in Memphis, Tennessee, the first son and third child of Temple Wall and Griffin Jasper Stockley, Sr. His family, which included sisters Sally Stockley Johnson and Harriet Stockley Barnett, lived in Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, where the elder Stockley owned a plantation. But for the most part Stockley was raised in the small delta town of Marianna, Arkansas, acknowledging later that it was a privileged existence.

"It had everything to do with being born white and having middle-class parents," he said. "Even while we were in the beginning of the civil rights revolution, I didn't allow myself to be aware of the injustices and inequality all around me. I preferred to be popular and fit in."

Stockley graduated from Southwestern College in Memphis (now Rhodes College) in 1965 with a bachelor's degree in international relations. He spent the next two years in Colombia as a Peace Corps worker, helping to develop the economy of rural areas, and shaping his lifelong political beliefs in the process.

"I remember seeing children with holes in their teeth and the typically distended bellies of malnourished people everywhere," he said, "and thinking those kids were just as bright as they could be but faced such a limited future. The irony is that I had to go to Colombia to come to terms with the kind of poverty and limitations that existed in my own hometown for half the population."

No sooner had Stockley returned from the Peace Corps in 1967 than a draft notice for him arrived in the mail.

"I went from an existence that was totally unstructured and where every day I was responsible for motivating myself, to a regimen that was completely dictated by someone else," he said. "It was quite a stretch! The irony was brought home to me every morning at 5 a.m., when my drill sargeant came through the barracks, screaming."

At the completion of his tour of duty, Stockley received his juris doctorate degree from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, and launched a 32-year career with the Center for Arkansas Legal Services, representing indigent and working-class people in civil law cases. He never considered any other kind of legal practice.

"Not everybody gets to be a white male growing up in the South," he said. "Working as a lawyer for Legal Services, and then later for the Disability Rights Center and the ACLU, allowed me to help others and maintain my own values and principles. It seemed a meaningful way to contribute to society and justify my existence."

Stockley's most notable case, Walker v. Arkansas Department of Human Services, successfully challenged the constitutionality of the juvenile justice system in Arkansas.

The case "helped bring about a real judicial system for parents and children in dependency/neglect cases," Stockley said. "Until Walker, there were no rules of evidence or procedure in juvenile court cases."

A CHARACTER "MUCH LIKE HIS CREATOR"
After 19 years of rejections, in which Stockley dutifully arose in the middle of the night to put in his "writing hour," his first novel, Expert Testimony, was published by Simon and Schuster, and introduced the unassuming lawyer-protagonist Gideon Page. During the next six years, Stockley produced four more “lawyer mysteries”: Probable Cause (1992), Religious Conviction (1994), Illegal Motion (1995) and Blind Judgment (1997). The San Diego Union-Tribune called Page "a bit unscrupulous, a trifle unethical, wholly cynical and no paragon of virtue." Stockley, for the most part, agrees. "Gideon, for better or worse, is a lot like his creator: not always consistent but occasionally entertaining."

His 2001 novel, Salted with Fire, continued the courtroom mystery but with a new character, Miller Holly, at the helm. And later that year, Stockley's first nonfiction work, Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919, was published, jump-starting Stockley's contributions as a historian of race relations. It was a career he'd actually begun in the 1970's.

"Through reading and my experiences in Colombia, I became increasingly aware of the real history of the South and Arkansas," he said, "and I wanted to write about it. The initial draft, of what would eventually become Ruled by Race, was called Thank God for Mississippi: Race Relations in Arkansas. I’m lucky that manuscript was never published!" he said. "I’ve learned a lot of history and I had a lot of help since then.The opportunity to revise and finish the manuscript appeared when he became the first Dee Brown Fellow at the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies.

FROM HALLS OF FAME TO UPPITY WOMEN
Stockley's numerous literary and historical awards include being inducted into the Arkansas Writers Hall of Fame in 2001, and winning the prestigious Porter Prize for Literary Excellence in 1999. He's also only the third writer to twice be awarded the Booker Worthen Literary Prize. Several community groups have recognized his service to children. He was named Public Citizen of the Year by two different organizations and, in 1992, the Arkansas Women's Political Caucus made him an Honorary Uppity Woman.

INAUGURAL FELLOWSHIP RECIPIENT
In March 2010, Stockley became the first recipient of an annual $10,000 grant bestowed by the William F. Laman Public Library Writers Foundation. The Laman Library Fellowship will assist Stockley in his completion of a book about a 1959 fire at the former Negro Boys Industrial School in Wrightsville, Arkansas, that killed 21 teenagers locked inside a dormitory.