Underneath the “fair and equal” ideals of American society lurk problems. Problems like racial discrimination, classicism and other prejudices haunt the U.S in subtle and less-than-subtle ways.  To deal with these problems, the United States government has created an army of lawyers that search out situations involving discrimination and fight back with court cases and lawsuits.  Judith E. Levy, the assistant United States Attorney for the eastern district of Michigan, is one such person.

Levy works under the U.S Department of Justice, a government organization devoted to insuring the practice of certain civil rights laws in the U.S.  Her clients can vary greatly. They can be anything from people who were refused housing to the entire Detroit public who suffer from an incompetent police force.  Even though Levy works on civil rights cases in about half of Michigan, she has a staff of only two other people. Because of this, Levy is responsible for much of the civil liberties cases in Michigan.

While Levy tends to get the most complaints from people with disabilities, she believes that racism is still the most widespread type of discrimination in the United States. “If you just look at look at fair housing complaints that are filed, we get more disability related complaints than any other complaints, but I am not sure that that is because there is more disability discrimination, I think that actually when they do testing and that sort of thing race discrimination is the deepest form of discrimination.,” she said.

An example of this is in Detroit.  “ [Today], a number of black people are moving out of the city and as they move out, the suburbs that are right around Detroit, are pushing back. They say, we see what happen to Detroit, it fell apart, we do not want you here. So there are a lot of fair housing cases with landlords in the inner ring suburbs that are immediately outside of [Detroit] who are refusing to let black people live in their apartments or in their houses,” Levy said.

While Detroit may have the most problems with racism, it is not the only place where Levy has had to deal with these sort of problems. “I also had a race case here in Ann Arbor on Packard road where Idaho house apartments apartment complex, the property manager there who lived there, an older white woman said no thanks, I don’t want black people living here”

When Levy represents someone in a discrimination case, it is not just her clients that she Is representing, it is also anyone who believes that discrimination should not be tolerated.  In many ways America has improved a lot, it has become more and more like the land of freedom and opportunity that is supposed to be.  It is through people like Levy that the idea of equal rights for all continues to shine throughout the world.