Mark Pearce was born and raised in Brooklyn. He went to Erasmus Hall High School and Cornell University. His parents were Jamaican and had no high school or college education, but they valued education and pushed their kids to achieve. He majored in political science at Cornell, although he liked fine arts. In his senior year, he took courses in Constitutional law, civil rights and Supreme Court decisions such as Gideon and the Scottsboro Boys. He went to law school wanting to defend victims of imbalance in the criminal justice system.

Pearce went to UB Law because the financial package was good, it was a smaller venue and he could make ends meet. When he went apartment hunting, he experienced racial discrimination for the first time. Since his voice didn’t reveal his ethnic identity, when he showed up after calling, apartments would suddenly be “taken.” This experience with racism convinced him that redress in the courts was the way to go.

Pearce’s notion of the law school was different from the reality: it was in Amherst, not Buffalo, and at the time, the campus was only O’Brian Hall and Baldy Hall and not much else. When he arrived, the building was new and the first-floor lecture hall had purple rugs. They called it the “purple pit.” The first year of law school was socially difficult for him, but he eventually became friends with a woman he married, along with Vicki Pryor, an active alumna and former CEO of Savings Bank Life Insurance.

Pearce loved Civil Procedure with Professor Adolph Homburger. To his surprise, his least favorite class turned out to be criminal law. “Providence lighted my way,” he said, and he got an opportunity for work-study with the National Labor Relations Board the first year UB offered labor law.

Pearce was hoping for a labor law job in New York City but met with little success. He passed the bar on the first try and was hired by the Buffalo NLRB office. In September 1979, he started with Region 3 of the NLRB. He stayed for 15 years. During those years, the presidency changed hands from Carter to Reagan to Bush.

Pearce then joined the union-side Buffalo law firm Lipsitz Green, adjusting to private practice and billable hours. He left to become one of the founding partners of a diverse labor law firm. Soon after, Barack Obama won the election, and Pearce was tapped to chair the NLRB.