Dear Vanderbilt Law School Community,
On behalf of the Black Law Students Association, we would like to wish the Vanderbilt Law School community a happy Black History Month and invite you to join us for events scheduled at VLS throughout the month.
As underrepresented students, we thought it especially important to bring attention to the contributions and strides made by Black lawyers, judges and jurists. Our use of the demonym Black (as opposed to African American) is respectful and intentional, as the former term is reflective of the existence and many shared experiences of members of the African diaspora. Vanderbilt BLSA members are diverse in our own right. Many of us are the children of immigrants or immigrants ourselves. Some are the first in our families to attend law school, while others come from long lines of Black legal professionals. We are embarking on different career paths including public interest, corporate work, clerking and academia. Despite our differences, we are all future members of an elite group: the 4.7 percent of Black lawyers in the United States.
Black people have long been aware that America is not a meritocracy for all. While we are proud of our own accomplishments in making it to the halls of a storied university like Vanderbilt, we are painfully aware that our number should be greater. American jurisprudence is enriched when law schools, firms, and courts are more inclusive, in part because we know that increased racial and ethnic diversity is necessarily accompanied by increased viewpoint diversity.
With that in mind, this February, we invite you to share in our triumphs by welcoming (back) to campus exceptional Black lawyers and judges, many of whom sat in our seats not so long ago. We encourage ALL students, staff, and faculty to take time out of their schedules to learn about important topics such as Black and Jewish Solidarity from the Civil Rights Era til Now and Disability Rights and the Law: Towards Equitable Access to Justice. We also ask for your attendance at panels entitled The Two Percent: Exceptional Black Women in the Legal Profession and Making It Big: Black Lawyers in Sports & Entertainment so we can introduce you to titans of their respective legal fields. Additionally, we invite you to celebrate Black culture with us at our February 11 Blackacre, generously sponsored by the law firm of Haynes & Boone, that will feature a friendly Black History trivia competition.
In planning this month’s programming, we realized that there were more brilliant Black jurists (including alumni) than we had the capacity to invite and so are more than happy to provide any interested organizations or faculty members a list of illustrious future guests. We firmly believe that Black and non-Black members of the VLS community alike have so much to learn from the guests we’ve invited and those we hope to bring to campus in the future.
We want to thank the Jewish Law Students Association, the Women’s Law Students Association, Law Students for Social Justice, the Entertainment & Sports Law Society, Career Services, Student Affairs, and the Office of Development and Alumni Relations for their support in bringing our vision for this month to life.
We hope you will join us in celebration of the myriad accomplishments, experiences, and perspectives of Black jurists this month.
Sincerely,
Toni Cross (she/her) and Janae Wilson (she/her)
Black History Month Co-Chairs
