JUSTICE SYLVIA HINDS-RADIX has a great deal to be proud of in her life. Not only is she an accomplished lawyer, and justice to the New York Appellate Court, but she is equally proud of her role as wife and mother.
“As a mother of three girls, I say to everyone that is the biggest job that God has given to me and if I fail at that and I’m successful at everything else, then I’ve failed,” she said. “I have three amazing daughters. So when I think about how it was growing up to where I am right now, I’ve been blessed.”
Hinds-Radix said her blessings from God started with two amazing parents.
“I had a father who never said I couldn’t achieve the goal that I wanted to. I was a little girl at eight years old telling him I wanted to be a lawyer,” she recalled. “He looked at me and said I will support anything that you want to do as long as you understand you have to treat the garbage man the same way that you treat the king.”
Those words have remained with Hinds-Radix throughout her life and have affected her and kept her driven. Those words kept her when she was at Howard University Law School. She is now an Associate Justice of the New York State Appellate Division and was appointed by Governor Andrew Cuomo.
But she also attributes a big part of her success in America to her early years in Barbados.
“I went to New York with a certain sense of blinders or arrogance about what I knew because of what I had been taught,” she said. “If you went to school under Louis Lynch you would understand that you have a role to play and that you can play.”
The role that Justice Hinds-Radix played early in her career was often helping those who were less fortunate.
“Essentially, I’ve always had service jobs. When I worked with the union it was servicing union members, and that was a programme that I always called ‘A voice for the voiceless’,” she said. “I represented people that would not have the ability to retain a lawyer if they had to do it themselves. That was when I started seeing the side of myself that my father talked about. He was saying to me that you have to be humble, you have to walk humbly and understand not to take yourself so seriously that you think you’re better than everyone else.”
She says the success of her family is owed to the work of several people, especially when you’re a lawyer and your husband has a successful dental practice.
“It was balancing. It was stressful but I was lucky because my mum was alive and she did a lot of the backup work,” Hinds-Radix said. “I have an amazing family and all the brothers and sisters are very close. Then I have an incredible husband who moved his dental practice into the house so that he would be at home in the evenings and the girls are upstairs and we had one of his family members come in to take care of them.”
Hinds-Radix can personally attest to the fact that it took a village to help her raise her children.
“I tell young women you can have it all but you have to understand that along the way there are some things that you give up,” she said candidly. “I did a lot of travelling for my job and there was always this huge sense of guilt, even though she was with my husband and my mother.”
Despite the tradeoffs that often come with success, Hinds-Radix said it was important for her to be a good role model for her daughters.
Though she has achieved great success in the United States, Hinds-Radix always credits her early years and life in Barbados for forming her core foundation.
“My dad never had a high school education, but education was important to him,” she recalled. “We were not allowed to speak in dialect – you’d get punished. He was the consummate Bajan but he wanted us to understand that we have to operate in the other world. We went to private high school, the Modern High School, and he paid. When my dad passed away, we were looking through his private papers and he had stock in Dacosta Manning. How did this man know about owning stock? I am a lawyer and it took me years before owning stock. We were always fed and clothed, so to encapsulate all of this I have to use the word blessing.”
Those blessings have trickled down to her own household and her children.
“My oldest daughter is 25 and she just graduated from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently in graduate school doing a master’s in public administration,” a proud Hinds-Radix said. “My middle daughter just graduated from Howard University and is applying to go back to dental school at Howard University to follow her dad, and my youngest daughter announced to us that she’s going to become a chef, so she’s now completed her first year in culinary arts at the State University of New York.”
But with the success that comes from her job, Hinds-Radix feels complete with her family and how they have been able to make it.
“We do and we have such fun with our children,” she said. “They are just wonderful. But I have always told them to the extent that God has given you so much is required of you . . . . For children who had what they had, two parents like us, there is no reason for them not to succeed and there’s no reason for them not to help other people succeed.”