COLUMBUS —Verda Colvin was a little girl growing up in Atlanta when she made herself a promise: “I promised myself when I was growing up that when I became an adult, I wouldn’t forget what it was like to be a kid, and all the emotional stuff you go through,” the Georgia Supreme Court justice said on a visit to Columbus, where she once served as an assistant U.S. attorney in federal court.

“You know, people tell kids all the time, ‘You don’t have any problems; you’re a kid.’ Well, that’s crap,” said Colvin, 56. “If it’s the biggest problem (a kid has) had, it’s as big as not being able to pay the mortgage that your parents might be thinking of.”

Appointed to the state’s highest court this past July, Colvin continues to speak with young people whenever she gets a chance, a practice she began as a Superior Court judge in Macon, where she regularly participated in a sheriff’s program for troubled youth.

She was in Columbus to speak to the bar association, and sat for an interview with the Ledger-Enquirer before her speech at the River Club downtown.

Her oratory has been notable nationwide since 2016, when a video of her speaking to kids in trouble went viral. When she made her remarks that day at the sheriff’s program, she was more keyed up than usual because some girls in her audience had been posting nude photos of themselves online, she said.

“I had some kids there who were placing pictures of themselves, nudity pictures, online, and just to see that a child would be in a place where in their mind, that would be an option, just was really disturbing,” she recalled.

So she addressed that: “Young ladies, whether anyone has ever told you before, you’re special. You’re uniquely made,” she told the girls. “Stop acting like you’re trash and putting pictures of yourself on the Internet. Stop being disrespectful to your parents. Care about your future. Be somebody. Anybody can be nothing.”

Colvin’s props that day were a diploma, a jail uniform and a body bag: “I had to really reach these kids in a real way,” she said Thursday. Her message was: “Get a high school diploma, so you can have some options in life.” Or else the kids would wind up in a body bag or a prison uniform, or poverty.

Colvin grew up in near poverty. Her mother and father divorced when she was 6 years old. But her father was always in her life, and her devout parents sent her to a private, religious school. Her faith gave her the morals she lives by, she said.

She got her bachelor’s degree in government and religion from Sweet Briar College in Virginia and her law degree from the University of Georgia. She gained trial experience as an assistant solicitor general in Athens, and she was good at it.

She interviewed to be a federal prosecutor in Atlanta, and in the year 1999 was assigned to the Macon office. But Columbus needed prosecutors, so for a year she came here, to practice before U.S. District Court Judge Clay Land, whom she called “very serious, but also very human.”

She felt honored every time she stood in court and said, “My name is Verda Colvin, and I’m here on behalf of the United States of America.”

“Although I was there for 14 years with the office, every time I said that, my heart kind of tingled,” she said.

She liked living in Columbus. She bought a house in Brookstone. Her son went to Grace Christian and took karate.

“I loved the city. My son at the time was in kindergarten and he loved Columbus, too,” she said. “Had it not been for the change in my life circumstances, I would have stayed in Columbus. That was my duty station and I loved it.”

But Macon needed her back, and Colvin moved there around 2001, and found she loved Macon even more. She since has devoted her professional and personal life to it.

After her years as a U.S. attorney, Colvin was appointed a Superior Court judge in 2014, in the Macon Judicial Circuit, where she saw teens charged with the worst crimes come before her, and decided their fate.

“I will tell you, even the kids who get into the most trouble, typically, they’re hurting,” she said. “There’s something that is missing, and they’re angry. And they have no control, when you think about it, over their lives. Everything they do is dictated by the rules that adults set, and so they’re frustrated…. They’re mad at the world.”

Sensing some children had been abused, she sometimes took them aside to privately ask what they needed her to do, she said.

“My heart goes out to children, because it appears since they don’t vote, and they don’t pay taxes, that in many ways they don’t count…. And children just want to be heard. They want someone to understand them,” she said.

Early offenses can label them for life, she said: “We have a problem, and this is true with adults and children, with defining people by their last worst act. And when you do that to a child who’s still developing, how do they move from that?”

In March 2020, Colvin was appointed to the Georgia Court of Appeals, but served only a year before Gov. Brian Kemp appointed her to the state Supreme Court, where she was the first African-American woman appointed by a Republican governor.

She still keeps her home in Macon, commuting to Atlanta three times a week for Supreme Court sessions, and she still talks to kids, doing the front line work she knows is needed.

“I think that’s important: They need to see public servants being servants to the public, and that’s how I see myself. That’s all I ever wanted to do,” she said.

She was upset when her 2016 video went viral, because she didn’t know anyone was recording it, and she didn’t want the kids and teens there thinking she’d set them up as pawns. “I never wanted them to feel that way, so I was upset because I didn’t want them to think I was disingenuous,” she said.

But it resonated: A grandmother told her she sat all her grandkids down, and made them watch it.

Sometimes kids tell her their parents won’t listen, and she advises the children to tell them, “Hear me with your heart,” she said.

“We have to have a heart for children,” Colvin said. “We have to hear them. Not just hear them, but listen to what they have to say…. So that’s what I hope that encourages people to do, to hear children with our hearts, not only our ears, but our hearts, so that we can meet them where they are to hopefully provide what they need to go on a different path.”