Though Jaylin Durham has just embarked upon what he hopes to be a long legal career, he already has his sights set on the type of attorney he aspires to be – Judge Clarence Parrish, the namesake of the scholarship he received in his final year in law school.
“He is sort of the holy grail of what a young African American male attorney would want to be,” said Durham, who graduated from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 2019 and works in the legal and compliance department at Eversana, a pharmaceutical manufacturing company in Chicago.
“What he was able to accomplish in his personal life and legal career, I think he would be like the gold standard.”
Parrish practiced law for nearly three decades and was known for accomplishing several firsts in the legal field in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. After graduating with a degree from UW Law School in 1952, the first-generation college and law student moved to Milwaukee, where he started a private practice in Milwaukee’s Bronzeville neighborhood. In 1980, Gov. Lee Dreyfus appointed him as a Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge. A year later, he became the first African American judge in county history to win a contested judicial election. He served until 1992. He was the first African American to serve on the executive committee of the Milwaukee Bar Association and the first African American appointed by the Wisconsin Supreme Court to serve on the State Board of Bar Commissioners. Before his death in 1992, Parrish also served as a Baptist minister, Milwaukee NAACP president and attorney for St. Mark AME church, among other roles.
The Judge Clarence Parrish Law Scholarship Fund was started in his memory in 1993 with a $6,077 gift from the Beta Alpha Boule chapter of the Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity. Parrish was one of several leaders who started the Milwaukee chapter and later served as its president.
Additional gifts over the years from friends, family, the fraternity and proceeds from the sale of Parrish’s book of poems helped build the fund. Each fall, a scholarship is awarded to an African American student at UW Law School, based on need and scholarship. To date, the designated fund has awarded 29 scholarships for a total of $24,550. Durham said receiving the scholarship gave him a sense of purpose.
“It gave me a belief that I would maybe in my career have as big an influence in my community as he has had,” Durham said.