“I love the idea of holding people accountable who abuse those of less power.” These words are spoken by Mona Lisa Wallace, attorney extraordinaire, fighter for justice, a brilliant and fearless crusader for the underdog and the powerless. For over 40 years Mona Lisa has been practicing law and taking on tough cases, cases of national importance, cases that test the limits of the judicial system and its systemic injustice to the poor and people of color. As she puts it, “If it moves our heart, we try to take it on.” Born in 1954, Ms. Wallace grew up in Spencer, a small town near Salisbury, NC, the daughter of a working-class family. Tragically, her father, a Navy veteran, died from asbestosis when Mona was a young girl. His death would one day spur Mona Lisa to take on asbestosis and other occupational hazard cases from around the country, and to win them. The first person from her family to graduate from college, Mona Lisa wanted to be either a doctor or a lawyer. After graduating in three years from UNC-Chapel Hill, she made her decision to enroll at Wake Forest University School of Law, one of the first women to do so. Wallace graduated and passed the bar exam in 1979. Moving back to Salisbury, her practice was limited to family law, but as an ambitious barrister, she gravitated to more challenging cases. Over the next four decades Mona Lisa and her law firm of Wallace and Graham expanded to include over 60 attorneys; it is now involved with a panoply of cases that include defective drug production, the use of forever chemicals in manufacturing, nursing home negligence, predatory lending, and occupational cancer, to name a few. Her litigation has bettered the lives of more than 100,000 workers in North Carolina alone, in such industries at warehousing, paper mills, and slaughterhouses. These cases have resulted in victories across the U.S. and without a doubt, have changed history. In 2013 Ms. Wallace began litigating what would be one of the key cases of her career: the lawsuit against Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer, and its practice of spraying hog waste into the air and the waterways on its more than 2,200 CAFOs in the state of North Carolina. Smithfield was not the only pork producer carrying out this destructive and dangerous practice. That said, it was a pioneer in the development of CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), which raise hogs in large structures across eastern North Carolina; thanks to their massive scale, these intensive operations destroyed the livelihood of traditional pig farmers. Pigs produce waste at four times the rate of humans; to deal with the amount of excrement, Smithfield CAFOs pumped it into slop lagoons and then sprayed into the air. This was the cheapest way to deal with the problem, despite the clear risks to the humans living nearby; the sprayed excrement causes breathing issues, lung damage, and many other health concerns. It affects the environment as well; hurricanes and floods routinely caused major discharges of hog excrement from the waste lagoons into the rivers and waterways of the state. Filing a tort claim based on the fact that the CAFOs were a public nuisance, Mona’s legal team began an arduous fight against a multi-billion corporation–-now owned by the Chinese company WH Group. The plaintiffs were 99% African-American; many of them had resided in Duplin, Onslow, and surrounding counties for generations. One of the key heroes of the story was Elsie Herring, who had fought for justice regarding the spraying for 25 years, to no avail. No one would help, not DEQ (Department of Environmental Quality) or local government officials. The hog lobby was too strong. Supporters of Smithfield mounted a carefully orchestrated campaign of intimidation, pitting the plaintiffs against Big Ag and its many adherents in eastern North Carolina. There were death threats, and the plaintiffs as well as Mona Lisa’s legal team were subjected to constant suspicion and mistreatment for the years of the fight. Ultimately Mona Lisa Wallace and her team won—-they hammered out victories in each of the five federal trials, resulting in $549 million in damages. But most of all, they won respect for their clients. This story transcends poverty, class and environmental racism. Though not a clearcut victory (spraying still goes on, though with improvements,) this case sends a message that the powerful can be defeated. Mona Lisa Wallace continues to take on challenging cases. Wallace and Graham is currently representing the Marines and their families who developed cancer from drinking water tainted with carcinogens at Camp LeJeune, and fighting Duke Power’s practice of burying coal ash in pits that ultimately fail and contaminate drinking water in nearby towns. Mona Lisa has won numerous awards for her work, including the American Trial Lawyer of the Year 2018 for Public Justice. For Mona, the ultimate reward is seeing justice for people who have been systematically mistreated, both because of their race and their economic status.