Attorney Jesse McCoy II, raised in public housing, teaches elite law students to save poor people from eviction.

“I feel like I have a very unique perspective in life because my mom was very revolutionary and my father was always in and out of prison,” said the Durham native. “…I always viewed myself as half of both sides. I guess it just primed me for a legal career in which you deal with both sides. Here, I deal with a lot of people who are low income and need legal assistance, and that’s the kind of community that I came from.”

In the spring of 2017, Duke University hired McCoy to teach housing law to students and launch a new initiative to reduce eviction filings in Durham County. The “eviction diversion” program was sorely needed in a county that had one eviction filing for every 28 residents during the fiscal year ending in 2016. Even though most of Durham County’s 311,000 residents are white, black and Latino renters received the majority of 5,000 eviction judgments issued last year.

McCoy and a skeleton crew of lawyers and law students—who prepare and argue cases under McCoy’s supervision—persuade landlords to accept payment plans with overdue tenants, sue over unsafe housing conditions, and in weaker cases simply help tenants buy more time to move out. Since last August, the diversion program has helped two-thirds of its clients stay in their homes and four out of five clients have kept the harmful mark of eviction off their records.