The humiliation of being pulled from class and told to leave the premises also infuriated her. She could not live with having endured racial slurs and having been cast aside while the school coddled its students and their wealthy parents and, as she alleged, retaliated against her for complaining that she had been mistreated.
After Griffin filed a lawsuit in December 2003, lawyers for Carlthorp tried to transfer the case from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica. Their efforts unsuccessful, they scheduled a deposition of Griffin, who says she faced a barrage of questions with barely any preparation from Carol Gillam, an employment lawyer she had hired. Gillam dropped Griffin when she discovered that her client had been convicted of a crime after applying at Carlthorp.
Griffin’s most recent lawyer, Loyst Fletcher, gave up on her when she refused to settle her lawsuit for $25,000 and sign a confidentiality agreement. Then he dismissed her lawsuit without her written permission, later conceding that he did little to pursue it. Griffin has until next week to set aside the dismissal and find a new lawyer. "I was adamant that Ericka settle," says Marks, who is now helping Griffin revive the lawsuit. "Ericka wanted to tell her story."
Â
Griffin’s upbringing is intertwined with her reasons for being at Carlthorp. She looks determined one day last fall as she enters a conference room in the library at Santa Monica College, where she is on the dean’s list as a film major and is set to graduate in 2005. Five feet 9 inches, lean with broad shoulders, she looks every bit the power forward she was at Santa Monica High School. A youthful 32, dressed in capri slacks, a light sweater and sandals, she wears a chain with a cross around her neck, and a heart-shaped locket that says "Teach Only Love." Away from her mother, Griffin is more animated. When it is suggested that she fits right in on the college campus, her eyes light up. "I like to think so," she says.
She is eager to talk about her reasons for pursuing a lawsuit that has dredged up her past, made her family uncomfortable and turned an entire community against her. She says she is offended by the abuse of social status at Carlthorp. Griffin comes from a family with history and pride. "We are not your stereotypical black family," she says, describing how her grandfather Theodore Reid witnessed his father murder his mother in Savannah, Georgia, when he was 10, then moved to Santa Monica in 1952 after graduating from Meharry Dental School in Nashville. "He sent for my grandmother and their three children, who had been staying with family in Georgia," Griffin says. "My mother was 4 months old. My grandfather set up his dental practice in a small office across the street from Santa Monica High School. The building is still there."
Griffin’s grandmother Norma Payton Reid was a graduate of Atlanta’s Spelman College, class of 1944. The Reids were devoted to community service. Besides his private practice, Theodore Reid donated time at the dental clinic at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. In 1967, he went to work for the Watts Health Foundation, a joint project of Los Angeles County and USC Dental School. He became chief of oral surgery, while Norma Reid worked in child development with the Head Start program. At age 80, she still works for Head Start as a consultant. Her husband, who served as proctor of the USC community dental program until 1978, died in 1992.
Raised in Malibu, Joette Marks, then Joette Reid, enrolled at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1970. She became pregnant before marrying Larry Griffin, a semipro basketball player who had been cut by the Golden State Warriors and had toured with Marques Haynes’ Fabulous Magicians, a spin-off of the Harlem Globetrotters. Reid embraced the counterculture of UC Santa Cruz, while Larry Griffin traveled and played ball in the Philippines, Mexico and Portugal. Ericka Griffin was born in 1972, and by the time she was 6 her parents had divorced, remarried and divorced again.
"Growing up in Santa Cruz was like living in the 1950s," Griffin recalls. "Nobody locked their doors, and you could ride your bike to the corner store and not fear getting abducted." She stood out in the mostly white community, for her height as well as her color. "I considered myself an outcast," she says. "I was more interested in fine-tuning my hoop skills than my social skills." The oldest of three children, she grew accustomed to supporting those around her. She saw her mother as less an authority figure than a young divorced woman struggling to get her act together. "I was never one to open up and tell about myself. I was always everyone’s shoulder to cry on."
Griffin left home when she was 12 and moved to Malibu to live with her grandparents. Her mother followed. With her mother preoccupied with raising her younger brother and sister, Griffin’s grandmother pushed her in a traditional direction. It seemed old-fashioned. "I was supposed to go to a Southern college, get my degree, then marry a doctor or lawyer," says Griffin, who was more concerned with her identity at Santa Monica High School. "Boys wanted a girlie-girl, a cheerleader type," she recalls. "I competed against them to toughen myself. I dreamed of graduating in a letterman’s jacket with personalized embroidering to read ‘Lady Hoopster.’ "
