Meeting Tjuana Byrd Manning for the first time puts on display everything you envisioned and nothing you’d expect.
She’s as stylish as you’ve heard, if far smaller in stature. Perched on an occasional chair in her tiny office at the county juvenile justice complex in Little Rock, she looks as if she could disappear entirely inside the large vase exploding with neon pink roses on her desk. She’s more soft-spoken than you might imagine, too, and these elements together make you wonder how she could ever command attention in a courtroom, be it from the well or from the bench.
That is, until the subject turns to children, the elderly, the poor or any of society’s other disenfranchised and discarded. When that happens, some unseen switch trips from within, and like a locomotive building steam, her eyes flash. Her voice takes on the passion of a Sunday spiritual, and she leans figuratively and physically into each succeeding point.
“In the households where I grew up, service was always displayed before me,” she said. “It wasn’t like somebody was saying, ‘Now, you’ve got to serve others.’ It was important to serve others because that’s what my grandmother was doing, what my mother was doing. My mother always had somebody’s child in the house; she was one of those people where folks who needed a soft place to land landed at our house.”
At this, Byrd Manning’s shoulders go back and her head cocks almost imperceptibly sideways, as if making sure her words are hitting home. Her Honor may have only taken the Pulaski County Circuit Division 8 bench 18 months ago, but the things she stands for have been the marrow of her soul for as long as she can remember.
“Love God, honor God,” she said, as if by mantra. “Make sure you represent your name well. And treat others like you want to be treated.”
Byrd Manning was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Things didn’t work out between her mom and her biological father, but when her stepfather came along it was, by all accounts, love at first sight. Flossie Byrd and Albert Tolbert were married after a three-month whirlwind courtship and after Albert’s hitch in the Air Force ended, the family planned its return to his native Arkansas. What happened next would indelibly shape Byrd Manning for the rest of her life.
“While they were here looking for where they were going to live, my grandfather died,” she said. “My uncles convinced my mother to let me stay [in North Carolina] with my grandmother for the summer, so she wouldn’t be by herself. Well, that request stretched out through the school year and another school year. By the time I was 5 years old until age 12, I lived with my grandmother.”
The experience laid the foundation for everything Byrd Manning would come to understand about the world: how to carry yourself, what to demand of yourself and the simple, comforting joys of knowing who you were and where you belonged. She also learned the broader meaning of community, radiating from the dinner table to the embrace of her church and her neighborhood.
“When I was growing up, the community raised you,” she said. “Any adult had some say or influence in what was going on with you to encourage you, to correct you, to discipline you even. These days, we’ve gotten so far away from that to where people are isolated in their own silos. But at the end of the day, we still need community. We need that village.”
Byrd Manning’s choice to enter law at the University of Arkansas was a combination of pragmatism — she’d discovered students in her first choice of pediatrics didn’t get much sleep — and aspiration.
“There wasn’t some epiphany and I can’t say that I had ever considered law before,” she said. “We didn’t have any lawyers in my family. When one of my friends from high school changed her major to criminal justice I was like, well, maybe I could try that out.”
After graduation, Byrd Manning returned to Central Arkansas where she’d attend law school at night and work as a probation officer by day, earning her law degree from then-UALR School of Law in 1996. Her first job was as a public defender in Little Rock District Court where she learned how to argue cases not of her choosing but dropped randomly on her desk.
“It’s trial and error, a whole lot of that,” she said of learning those ropes. “It’s really just a matter of practice. The very first time I had to tell somebody, ‘They’re offering you 12 years in prison,’ that was hard. How do you say that to someone? I didn’t go to a class that said this is how you do it; the job just kind of puts you there.”
It wasn’t long before Byrd Manning’s career took root serving juveniles, the primary focus of her North Little Rock private practice. She’d serve as attorney ad litem for children in foster care and earn various appointments by Governors Mike Beebe and Asa Hutchinson to state boards dealing with child abuse and neglect and juvenile justice. Through these experiences, certain common denominators quickly emerged.
“A lot of the social ills come out of poverty,” she said. “Poverty has always been, and I don’t have any evidence that the government and the powers that be have an interest in everyone achieving equity. While we say that exists, it doesn’t really.”
Along the way, Byrd Manning worked with judges who each played a role in who she became as an advocate and an attorney. Out of these, Judge Joyce Williams Warren became her north star, guiding her decision-making and career aspirations.
“I just liked the way she was in the courtroom,” Byrd Manning said. “Judge Warren was one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. She knew the law, but she was also able to engage with people in kind of an ‘Aunt Joyce’ kind of way and that appealed to me. I said, ‘I want to be her when I grow up.’”
Outside of her practice, Byrd Manning was active in The Women’s Foundation, a group dedicated to improving economic opportunity through education, which she would eventually head as its first Black president. Her leadership brought a jolt of energy to foundation programs such as Women Empowered, designed to improve the economic well-being of women in Arkansas, and Girls of Promise, which introduced middle schoolers to STEM fields.
Three years ago, the foundation launched an ambitious internship program targeting college-aged women of color in STEM fields, naming it after her. While humbled by the gesture, she’s as adamant as anything to place the credit for that program where it belongs.
“I really need everyone to understand that it wasn’t me who came up with that program, the credit for that belongs with the staff and the executive director,” she said. “When they wanted to name it after me, I mean, what an honor.”
That said, she fully owns the effort she put into being a role model through the foundation, inspiring the next generation.
“Representation, that’s the stamp for me, because women statewide got to see me,” she said. “Little Black girls who participated in our programs got to see me and be in the room with other incredibly intelligent, powerful women. They could see themselves.”
Since taking her seat on the bench in 2021, Byrd Manning has ruled in a manner coalescing the combined lessons of her experiences into a central philosophy. Life is about choices, and choices beget outcomes, and outcomes beget accountability, and accountability, well child, there’s plenty of that to go around.
“Our kids need hope, they need love, they need structure. Those aren’t new things, but I don’t feel like kids get as much of those as they need right now,” she said. “Look at the suicide rate for young people. Gun violence is bananas. A lot of behaviors I see are modeled behaviors. They’re imitating what they’ve seen.
“Parents just aren’t really doing what they used to. It’s hard for us as a court, even with the services that we put in place, to try to change a 16-year-old who’s had this existence of going home to no boundaries, no expectations. So, my court orders very often include directing parents to do things parents ought to do.”
Some defendants, babies really, she worries may never shake the modern-day shackles of systemic poverty, residual trauma and generational disenfranchisement. Others surprise her, and these reignite her overriding worldview that anything is possible for those who believe in — and work for — redemption.
“However bad it is with the kids, it’s happening on our watch,” she said. “What are we doing? There’s something that each of us can be doing. We can volunteer an hour in school a week. We can help a child in our neighborhood. We can check a child who’s running the streets who shouldn’t be running. Just to provide a sense of support and community, what so many of us grew up with. It’s not too late for that.
“I refuse to be overcome with the negativity. I cannot, because if we give up, then what? And I’ve got some tough cookie cases, I mean, some tough ones where I have no clue what’s going to happen with these kids. I don’t know! I pray, literally, for God to intervene in their lives. But I think as long as we’re living, there’s a chance. As long as we’re alive, there is an opportunity for change, change for the good.”
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