Does title change treatment?
Questions continue.
A century after my incident, law students watched old video.
The quality looked primitive.
One laughed at uniforms.
Professor paused before slap.
Asked:
“What is legally relevant right now?”
Students answered.
No status.
No robe.
No title.
Only facts.
Then video played.
Slap.
Gasps, even after all those years.
Thomas enters.
“Your Honor.”
Students felt reversal.
Professor paused.
“Why does this feel satisfying?”
One student:
“Because officer realizes mistake.”
Professor:
“What mistake?”
“Hit judge.”
Professor shook head.
Another student:
“Hit someone without lawful basis.”
“Better.”
A third:
“Assumed identity and escalated when challenged.”
“Better.”
Professor asked:
“If she were Maya Reynolds, would conduct become acceptable?”
“No.”
“Then title is narratively important, legally irrelevant.”
Exactly.
Lesson survived.
One student later became prosecutor.
Another defense attorney.
One police lawyer.
One judge.
One left law entirely.
Each carried some fragment.
The famous image of me standing near Miller circulated less over time.
Good.
New stories came.
New failures.
New reforms.
History moved.
A Black judge being mistaken for defendant became less shocking perhaps, then shocking again depending era.
Progress is not line.
It loops.
Backslides.
Remembers.
Forgets.
That was why I had warned:
Safeguards expire when maintenance stops.
One county removed complaint auditing to save money.
Three years later pattern emerged.
They reinstated.
Another automated bias monitoring but algorithm missed context.
They adjusted.
No permanent solution.
Boring work.
Successful when boring.
Maya’s phrase and mine merged.
Boring is success.
A future judge quoted at conference:
“If your civil-rights policy only becomes visible during scandal, it is failing.”
True.
No one knew origin.
Fine.
One hundred fifty years after that November morning, Monroe County renovated courthouse again.
My inscription removed temporarily.
A contractor found old steel locker containing paper.
Inside faded incident report.
Officer Miller’s.
“Falsely claimed judicial status.”
The phrase.
Archivists preserved.
A young historian read.
Was shocked.
“How could he finalize this after learning she was judge?”
System logs showed timing.
Maybe report workflow prepopulated.
Maybe anger.
Maybe negligence.
Historian wrote article not about racism primarily, but documentation inertia.
How initial assumptions persist in records even after disproved.