She Took Justice: The Black Woman, Law, and Power 1619 to 1969 with Professor Gloria J. Browne Marshall

Co-sponsored by Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc.®, Delta Psi Omega Chapter, the Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice, and the NAACP, Ann Arbor Chapter

Wednesday, June 30, 2021 ~ 7:00 8:30 p.m. via Zoom
REGISTER HERE

“The Black Woman is extraordinary. These true stories reveal courage in the face of racial prejudice and gender oppression. The Black Woman fought enslavement in court. She challenged laws enacted to make her human property. She became an activist for her own freedom, learned the law and became a judge. She used the law to liberate herself. . . . This was done in the midst of terrorists intent on murder, and few legal protections. . . . Yet she took justice. Her story is my story.” These are the opening words of Gloria Browne-Marshall’s compelling history, She Took Justice: The Black Woman, Law, and Power – 1619 to 1969. Browne-Marshall relates the heroic stories of a score of Black women warriors for justice, beginning with African Queen Nzingha’s fight against Portuguese slavers in the seventeenth century, and ending with the election of Shirley Chisholm to Congress in 1969, the first Black woman elected to the U.S. House. A few years later, of course, in 1972, Chisholm would become the first African American and first woman candidate for a major party’s nomination for U.S. President.

Please join us for this special event, a presentation and conversation with Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, Professor of Constitutional Law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. Browne-Marshall teaches classes in Constitutional Law; Race and the Law; Evidence; and Gender and Justice. She taught in the Africana Studies Program at Vassar College prior to joining the faculty of John Jay. She is a civil rights attorney who has litigated cases for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama, Community Legal Services in Philadelphia, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Inc. Professor Browne-Marshall has spoken on issues of law and justice in Ghana, Rwanda, England, Wales, Canada, South Africa and before the United Nations in Geneva. In addition to She Took Justice, Professor Browne-Marshall is the author of The Voting Rights War (2017) and Race, Law, and American Society (2013), and scores of articles in the academic and popular press. Professor Browne-Marshall is also the author and producer of the short 2021 film, Dreams of Emmett Till.
This special event is in commemoration of the signing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, in recognition of both the power and the limitations of that document, and in honor of the dramatically underappreciated contributions of Black women to the women’s suffrage movement in the U.S.