By Sym Posey | The Birmingham Times
Whether it’s being relocated to Birmingham from Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina or dealing with homelessness as a student at Miles College, Don Mosely, 10th Judicial Circuit County Administrator in Jefferson County, is used to weathering storms.
Coming from a family of nine siblings, Mosely didn’t have much.
“I was a first-generation college student. My family, we didn’t have it like that. I didn’t know anything about college,” he said. “I just knew I wanted to go from the time I was in high school because there was a football coach that told me he thought I was worthy of college.”
Overcoming Obstacles
While attending Miles College, in Fairfield, Alabama, Mosely struggled financially.
“My mom didn’t even know how to send me money while I was away at school. I was home every now and then, and at the time all I had was minutes on my phone. It wasn’t even a flip phone, and I had like two minutes every month. I used to try to go home and ask and beg for money, but they couldn’t support me,” he said. “There’s something about not being able to have access to things that maybe other people who do have a mom or a dad that knows what to do once they get to college — simple things, like where to go, where not to go. Nobody told me about the [cafeteria] food. I was lost, and I felt bad.”
At one time, Mosely was homeless until he found employment working for TeleTech, now named TTEC Holdings Inc. The customer experience technology company closed its Fairfield, Alabama, location in 2008.
“From [working there] I was able to buy myself some clothes, buy myself some food. I found a friend that had a house in Fairfield that allowed me to live there until school started,” he remembered.
Though Mosely found it hard to ask people for help, he eventually found people on the Miles campus “that were able to breathe life into me or were able to give me the essence of culture, class, and civility,” as a participant in the TRIO Student Support Services (Trio SSS) program, he said.
TRIO SSS, a federal program authorized by the Higher Education Act, provides support services to college students with the aim of improving their retention, graduation rates, financial and economic literacy. Students who face barriers to completing college —including those who are first-generation students, have disabilities, or low-income — are aided by success coaches, mentors and peer-to-peer support.
Mosely credits the program with helping him to graduate cum laude; and as time went on, he said, “I knew I had something behind me that was so much more than I could ever imagine — I had a praying wife.”
Attitude vs. Altitude
Looking back, the 36-year-old knew he wanted to be a lawyer, even when others didn’t think he could be. In fifth grade, he told his teacher he wanted to pursue law.
“She was like, ‘I don’t think so,’” Mosely recalled. “She asked me and [another student] in the class up to the front of the room and we did what was called an Altitude Test, one of those assessments that tells you what you’re going to be when you get older. Both mine and the other students said, ‘scientist and lawyer.’ The teacher asked the entire class who they thought would be a scientist and a lawyer, and everyone chose the other student. I was a little ashamed.”
“She said I couldn’t do it, and that sealed my motivation for becoming a lawyer,” added Mosely, who proved them all wrong because now he serves a 10th Judicial Circuit County Administrator for the Alabama Office of Court.
Mosely was born and raised in Houma, Louisiana, and attended Ellenger Memorial High School, where he played football, ran track, and marched in the band. Still, life in Louisiana wasn’t easy. From a very young age, he recalled seeing his first dead body.
“It’s traumatizing when you grow up and live around that [while] trying to get out,” he said.
In 2005, shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit, his family relocated to Birmingham.
“I had already applied to schools [in Louisiana] and was waiting on my acceptance. The next thing you know, Katrina washed it all away,” he said. “[For] my mom and dad, it was courageous of them to move us out of the state because … a lot of folks from Louisiana don’t generally leave. They call it ‘Weathering the Storm.’”
Mosely recalled what it was first like to arrive in Birmingham: “[My family] was so big that they couldn’t put us in an evacuation center together, so we had to get a police escort from downtown Birmingham to McCalla, [Alabama], or something, and they opened a full shelter for us. We had so many people and so much food. First thing my dad did was pop open the gumbo.”
A Shining Example
At Miles, Mosely studied criminal justice and graduated with a 3.0 GPA in 2011. With five sisters and four brothers, Mosely, who falls in the middle said, “I had nine other brothers and sisters. We’re all one after the other. I had to look and see what I was doing. I had to be the shining example, so I just couldn’t come home empty handed.”
Mosely’s journey to law school was not linear. After graduating from Miles in 2011, he went on to an internship at the state capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, before returning to the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) where he applied for a master’s program at UAB and found out he needed to take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) to be admitted.
“I was like, ‘Oh, there’s no way I can do this.’ Then they came back and told me I could be accepted into the program if I retake my statistics class from undergrad,” he recalled. “It was like a conditional acceptance. I went to the statistics class and failed miserably.”
Mosely felt defeated and “gave up,” he said.
Around the same time, Mosely met his wife, Whitney, and the two had just had their first child. “I was over the edge. I needed to do something to make sure I not only make my family proud but also make my son proud and earn a decent living,” he said.
With limited options, Mosely worked four different jobs — A1 Solutions, Alexander Shunnarah, Best Buy, and Henig Furs — just to sustain his family. He even sent his family back to Louisiana while he lived out of his car.
“I had four jobs just so I could make ends meet. I remember my wife telling me not to give up and to keep trying, and she gave this quote by James Baldwin that said, ‘You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with it.’ Then she asked me if I’d ever thought about law school.”
Mosely started practicing for the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT), but, he said, “[I] was doing so bad.”
But that’s where his “praying wife” came in. “[Whitney] pushed me and got me to put my application into the Birmingham School of Law. Just when I pushed the button to give up, I got the [letter stating], ‘Congratulations, you’ve been accepted.”
Mosely graduated from the Birmingham School of Law in 2018. Today, the proud father of three, ages 11, 10, and 6, said he and his wife are planning to adopt.
A member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Incorporated, Mosely was named as an honoree for the 2024 Birmingham Business Journal’s “40 under 40.”
Of the honor, Mosely said, “I haven’t felt it because I’m always looking to do more. With the world that we’re in, especially all the places that I had to be, I had to make sure I stood out as a pinnacle or as a guiding light because nobody in my family, nobody that I know personally did it. I always tell my kids: ‘I was the first because I knew you guys wouldn’t be the last.’”
