Alfredo M. Arreguin's portrait of Justice Charles Z. Smith

Written by Justice Steven C. González

Alfredo M. Arreguin's portrait of Justice Charles Z. Smith was unveiled on May 20, 2014. The artist included the names of Justice Smith's loved ones throughout the portrait. Born into a world of poverty and segregation in Florida, Justice Smith was born to a Cuban father and African-American mother. He served as a court reporter in the Army during World War II and was admitted to the University of Washington Law School. After graduating in 1955, Smith could not land a job with a Seattle law firm but did get a clerk's job at the state Supreme Court. He went on to have a landmark legal career, and was the first person of color in Washington to serve as a municipal judge, superior court judge and justice on the state Supreme Court. He served as a mentor for hundreds, and retired from the Supreme Court in 2002. For more information, see the Secretary of State's Legacy Project interview with Justice Smith, https://www.sos.wa.gov/legacy/stories/charles-z-smith/pdf/complete.pdf.

For the decade following Justice Smith's retirement, no person of color sat on the Supreme Court. In 2012, Justice Steven C. González was appointed. Here is an account of what happened when Justice González took his family to the Temple of Justice for his 2012 swearing-in ceremony:

In the halls next to the courtroom in the Temple of Justice, outside the clerk's office, hang the pictures of every justice who has retired from the court. As I showed our boys my new workplace, our then 7-year-old son looked at the pictures and asked me: “Why are they all white, Dad? Why are there no people like us?” I promised him it would change. I showed him the one photo of Justice Smith at the far end of the hallway. Otherwise, there were no pictures of people of color. Today, six of the nine justices are women and two are people of color. Still, the portraits do not show diversity. I would like people visiting the Temple of Justice to see diversity. All children who visit should dream big dreams and imagine themselves on the court. So, I introduced Alfredo M. Arreguin my dear friend and a gifted artist, to Justice Smith and his wife, Eleanor, with the hope that Alfredo would paint a portrait of the jurist. Now, my dream is for children to see it hanging in the Temple of Justice. (http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns-magazine/september-2014/traditions/)

In 2014, the portrait was unveiled. Justice González commissioned two portraits, the first is located at the Temple of Justice, where Justice Smith served for 14 years, and the second is located at the University of Washington School of Law, where Justice Smith graduated from and would later serve as law professor and associate dean.

In addition, this is from a book: Lauro Flores in Alfredo Arreguín: Patterns of Dreams and Nature. Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2002, pp. 2, 5.

Although born in Mexico, Arreguín developed as an artist and consolidated his professional career in Seattle, Washington, where he has lived almost continuously since 1956. His early childhood and adolescence, as well as later experiences that led to his maturity as a genuinely American painter, in the real, hemispheric sense of this term, endow him with a unique perspective on life and the world. Many of the intricate and exuberant elements that stamp a distinctive character on his works are generated by his memories of his country of birth. Mexico's alternately vibrant and ascetic culture––its exquisite ceramics, textiles, and wood handicrafts; its tumultuous and glorious history, from the cosmogonies and sacred rites of the Tarascan (Purhépecha), Mayan, Aztec, and Olmec civilizations to the wars of conquest and independence; its verdant and torrid nature and landscape––eventually overlaps and blends, dreamlike, with his experiences in this serene and beautiful corner we call the Pacific Northwest of the United States. But his creative vision goes beyond these influences and derives inspiration from a multiplicity of sources that include, as we shall see, some art forms from Korea and Japan, where he served in the U.S. military.