When Mecole Tate was 18 years old, she had her first baby girl, who she carried across the stage at her high school graduation. Two years later she had her second. This year, both of her daughters watched her deliver a graduation speech at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law when she received her J.D., magna cum laude, having served as 3L class president. She posted on her LinkedIn account, “I broke the generational curse of a being a teenage mom statistic to becoming part of the 2% of Black women lawyers in the US.” Mecole shares more of how she did just that.
I grew up in a low-income neighborhood in San Francisco. In high school, most of my friends, including myself, had absent parents, leaving us to practically raise ourselves, or to be raised by our already overburdened grandmothers. Many were either already mothers or were pregnant. I’m adding this context to illustrate that at the time, I didn’t think it was unusual to have a child so young.
It wasn’t until my last semester of high school that I realized how having a child young would impact my life. I went to school 12 hours some days to make sure I graduated with my peers. I didn’t have a plan post-graduation. I never took the SAT because I didn’t know I needed to, and my grades weren’t good enough for college anyway. I went straight into the workforce because I had to support my family.
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