TCNJ

28 The College of New Jersey Magazine the state Senate, as she did earlier this year, as a mouse. "Over the years, I got over my public speaking issues," Stanfield says. "I'll never be the kind of person who loves being up at the podium, but I do it." A daughter of educators who met as students at Trenton State, Stanfield absorbed the lesson at the kitchen table that "you do what you can to serve," she says. And throughout her career, as a mother of biracial children, she has been a champion of civil rights in areas of employment and criminal justice. Still, when George Floyd was killed in 2020, Stanfield found, after some self-reflection and "several long talks with my son," that she had not been using her voice as fully as possible. And she publicly owned up to it. "I had to confront a very uncomfortable reality about myself," she wrote in an op-ed. "I totally dropped the ball and did not do the most important thing I could do, which was to speak out loudly and clearly, each and every time, I heard someone make a statement that showed their implicit bias." She pledged "to speak up, because when people believe these things and their thoughts go unquestioned, they accumulate over time and lead to a feeling of superiority and entitle- ment," she wrote. Stanfield is also a co-sponsor of a proposed constitutional amendment to guarantee environmental rights for all, in recognition of the reality that "particularly in urban areas and lower-income areas, people don't always have the same quality of air and water that we have in other areas of the state." "Those issues are important to me, that everybody has opportunities, everybody gets treated the same," she says. Jean Stanfield '84 New Jersey Senate Jean Stanfield was so shy that she dropped out of Trenton State College for a semester rather than fulfill a public speaking requirement for graduation. Though she was already married and a mother twice over, "I remember being terrified," she says. She returned when the requirement was changed to allow group discussion because "I was better at talking in small groups," she says. Stanfield is reticent no more. You don't serve 18 years as Burlington County sheriff, win election to the state assembly, and then move up to

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