Former Acting U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates and longtime civil rights activist Vernon Jordan Jr., now senior counsel at Washington’s Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, on Wednesday spoke out for gun control and called on an Atlanta audience not to despair on the state of the nation.

Honored at the Anti-Defamation League’s 21st Annual Jurisprudence Luncheon, the two attorneys with deep Atlanta roots engaged in a 30-minute discussion with former Georgia Supreme Court Justice Leah Ward Sears, now a partner at Atlanta’s Smith, Gambrell & Russell. The White House fired Yates in January 2017 after she refused to defend President Donald Trump’s first travel ban executive order targeting seven predominantly Muslim countries.