Joe Tucker

Joe Tucker is causing a scene.

It’s a cold March afternoon – the kind of afternoon that makes you wonder if spring really is just around the corner. Tucker is standing in the street, in front of what appears to be a vacant row home that has seen better days. Tucker, immaculately dressed in an Italian designer suit and seemingly unfazed by the frigid temperature, talks about the brickwork, the stairwell, and the porch, which isn’t on the house anymore but used to be. He talks to the woman across the street watching from her own porch, addressing “Miss Ruthie” by her first name. He smiles and waves to seemingly every car that comes down the street as he sees people from years gone by. He clearly knows the neighborhood and many of its current residents, and well he should. We are standing near the corner of 24^th and Lehigh. We are standing where Joe Tucker grew up.

As Tucker poses for photos in front of the home he grew up in, a crowd of young teenagers, perhaps walking home from school, stops, stares, points, and whispers. “They probably think he’s some rapper,” Miss Ruthie says.

But Tucker is not a rapper. Rather, Tucker is the shareholder and managing partner of Tucker Law Group. In his career, he has tried more than 75 cases to jury verdicts in state and federal courts for individual plaintiffs and the colleges and universities he represents. He has successfully argued cases before the Pennsylvania Commonwealth and Superior and Supreme Courts, as well as federal cases before the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

Tucker recalls his father working so hard as a laborer that at the end of the day he was too tired, and his body too sore, to bend over and take his shoes and socks off.

Much of Tucker’s success has stemmed from his commitment to understanding his clients’ stories, from beginning to end. “When you understand the beginning,” Tucker told a crowd at Temple Law School in the spring of 2015, “you understand everything else.”

To know Tucker, then, you need to know his beginnings. Tucker’s story starts in the heart of North Philadelphia. Tucker’s parents moved to Philadelphia from the Carolinas, escaping segregation and searching for better opportunities. What they found was a harsh reality, working long hours in tough conditions for minimal pay.

Tucker recalls his father working so hard as a laborer that at the end of the day he was too tired, and his body too sore, to bend over and take his shoes and socks off. He hid the pain by offering his kids a quarter to take them off for him. Tucker’s mother worked eight hours a day in an asbestos-filled clothing factory, carrying large quantities of clothing back and forth across the football-field-sized warehouse to fill clothing orders for the department stores downtown, before coming home to make dinner for Tucker and his three siblings.

Tucker inherited his parents’ impressive work ethic, and began working at a young age, cleaning bathrooms in the factory where his mother worked or applying hot tar to roofs in the summertime to pay for college. After graduating from Howard University and working as a CPA in New York City, Tucker returned to his home in Philadelphia to attend Temple Law School. He worked at least two jobs throughout law school, slept in his childhood bunk bed, and walked back and forth to law school to save on subway fare.

Tucker recalls studying at the Law Library very late one night during law school and returning home to find the doors and windows locked. He pounded on the door, but his father wouldn’t let him in, and he ultimately spent the night sleeping on the porch of the home. The next morning, he received a stern lecture from his father, who told him that if he was going to be out all night partying, he wasn’t going to be allowed in the house. “But Dad,” said Tucker. “I wasn’t out all night partying. I was at the library studying.” Tucker’s dad, however, who never had the opportunity to attend school, wasn’t swayed. “He told me there wasn’t any library that was open that late,” says Tucker. From then on, Tucker made sure to be home by nightfall.

As Tucker poses for photos in front of the home he grew up in, a crowd of young teenagers, perhaps walking home from school, stops, stares, points, and whispers. “They probably think he’s some rapper,” Miss Ruthie says.

Since graduating from Temple Law School in 1989, Tucker has married – he met his wife, Alycia Horn (LAW ’89), during his law school orientation – become a father, and founded his own firm, where he has taken on important and occasionally controversial cases, including a discrimination case against a local swim club and a case that centers around police brutality. Together with Horn, Tucker has also created and funded two scholarships for Temple Law students: the Alycia Horn and Joe H. Tucker, Jr. Scholarship and the Carl Singley Scholarship. “I struggled financially throughout my law school career and we hope to alleviate that problem for someone in similar circumstances,” Tucker explains.

And it’s here that Tucker’s emphasis on a story’s beginning makes sense. Because to see Tucker, well-dressed and in the midst of an impressive legal career, would be to assume that he has always been fortunate in life. And that assumption would discount how impressive Tucker truly is. When you understand the beginning, you understand everything else.