Khadija Carver

From SuspireWiki

The 1950s is considered, in modern times, to be the ideal of the American dream but for a girl like Alice Mae Carver it was anything but ideal. She was the fourth of five children, but due to the deadly nature of Polio and the lack of a vaccine she was the second oldest child. Her parents, both children of freed slaves who, like their parents, were under educated for anything more than manual labor. Sadly they expected no better for their children considering that the racial tensions and segreation still ran deep in the South, espcially in the deep woods of Tennesse where Alice Mae lived.

It was a shock in 1955 when Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas declared schools unsegregated and while Alice Mae wasn't the first black child in a white school she was the first in her family. And inspired by the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King Junior and other African Americans of importance she was also the first in her family graduate high school. With the help of her driven nature and a grant from the UNCF Alice Mae was even able to attain something unthinkable in her family, a college education.

Her life in school was not easy, however. She grew bitter at having to work twice as hard as the other (read as: white) students to break even. She hated being passed over for things that she deserved because of her skin color. But she looked past it and worked hard in school.

Between classes and work she found herself immersed in the cultural battles of the downtrodden. Black, white, hispanic, anyone that is a member of what she'd come to call the cultural downtrodden. She entreached herself in urban rebuilding projects and with what little free time she had left she tutored students.

She graduated with honors and again, thanks the the UNCF and a handful of jobs she made her way into law school where she dedicated her time and mind to the pursuit of civil rights law fascinated by the implications of societal entrapment for minorities.

After graduating she took to the road and took up the slogan of "have license will travel" where she moved from city to city taking cases that involved racial or social discrimination. She took the cause of the down trodden on her back, winning small victories across the country.

It was in this that she caught the attention of her sire, Naeem King. She was in the middle of what was, without question, her highest profile case to date. She was defending a black man accused of raping a white teenaged girl and then beating the girl to death. The case consumed her entirely and she poured every bit of her legal knowhow into the case and then the truth came out, her defendant was, despite his claims otherwise, entirely guilty. Here she was, in the middle of a case that could, in a lot of ways, make her a name. It was, after all a highly publicized case. And furthermore she could win it. But... He was guilty.

On one hand it was a way to win one for the black man. She could say that he was a victim of society, that it wasn't his fault, that he was trained that way. She could prove that this was not his fault, but the fault of the oppressive society that creates in the black man a sickness. But on the other hand she could hear her grandfather, in his thick accent (which she'd long since lost), telling her "nah girl chil dont no white man be making me do nuhin tha i aint got in my soul to be doin." She thought about how he, a former slave, would just as quickly stand for an innocent white man as he would to hang a guilty black man.

She stepped down from the case and that is when Naeem gained the right to embrace her and changed her name to Khadija after the wife of the Prophet Muhammad who was also a strong woman who kept to her convictions and through her helped to rise up the Prophet as he hoped she would help to rise up the Carthian Movement.

That is, for a number of years just what Naeem and Khadija did. They would move from city to city where the Carthian Movement was just gaining a foothold and they, together, would inspire the troops as it were - helping to build up the movement. They'd even, shortly after Elijah DuQuette's claim of praxis, made a short appearance in the city.

Her love of law and justice, however, did not die when she did. She took up jobs teaching law classes at night school and even created a small non profit organization (which now helps to pay her bills) that builds scholarships for African Americans. And it's this love of the law that built an interest in the implications of Carthian law and the possibilities that lay within the law, both negative and positive and in recent nights she has set to the study of it.

Ultimately it's this that's brought her back to Atlanta - the ability to study the Law as it evolves in Atlanta.