From the Archives

The Classroom From the Archives

70 YEARS AGO Jean Camper Cahn ’52

BY DEANNA FOX

Jean Camper Cahn ’52 came to Emma Willard School from Baltimore with a sense of equity, service, and courage already embedded deep in her being. Her father was a physician and a social activist, and her mother was a hairdresser. Her childhood home was a meeting place for local NAACP chapters; notable activists like Thurgood Marshall and Paul Robeson were regular guests. When she was admitted to Emma Willard School, she was one of the first Black students to attend. Jean fully engaged the Emma experience as an active member in Campus Players, choir, The Clock staff, and the literary board for The Gargoyle.

The troubles of Baltimore were never far from her mind, despite her successes at Emma: while a student in the 1950s, the Black population of Baltimore experienced unprecedented eminent domain issues. As many as 90 percent of the 25,000 families displaced for infrastructure projects in Baltimore were Black, continuing a long history of racial profiling and redlining. It would be two years after Jean graduated that the historic Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case would declare school segregation unconstitutional, but ideas of equity and inclusion were already stirring within Jean.

After graduating from Emma, Jean enrolled in Northwestern University before transferring to Swarthmore, where she would meet her future husband, Edgar S. Cahn. Jean and Edgar married in 1957, a notable union both for their combined legal prowess and the fact that they were an interracial couple married a decade before Loving vs. Virginia declared antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional.

Jean and Edgar both then went on to attend Yale Law School (she graduated in 1961, two years before her husband, while also bearing children) before they were called to start a legal aid society in New Haven, Connecticut, encouraging the allocation of government funds to protect the constitutional liberties of all citizens. While there, Jean and Edgar established a new course for legal justice for all people in the US. One hallmark achievement in her time in New Haven was overturning the practice of withholding the remains of dead infants until parents could pay their medical bills. This display of prioritizing monetary gain over humanity challenged Jean’s sense of fairness and equity, driving her to redefine legal representation for all people.

Jean knew that the only way to create lasting change was to engage with existing legal structures and act as a catalyst for transformation. With Edgar, she wrote extensively for the Yale Law Review on the need for government funding for legal societies, pro bono consultation, and representation of the traditionally underserved. For Jean, lifting people out of poverty could occur through stringent legal advocacy and litigation, coupled with the community organization her father had introduced her to before her days as an Emma student.

By 1965, Jean had opened her own law office in Washington, DC, specializing in corporate law and consulting on legal services for impoverished people.

She became an international attorney on African affairs, achieving the distinction while also raising two young children, her first having been born on the starting day of her law school examinations. Jean’s work in fair legal representation offered a reputation that followed her to Washington, where she was tapped to become the first director of the US Office of Economic Opportunities Legal Services Program. By the end of the 1960s, under Jean’s authority, the program had provided $40 million in legal services to impoverished individuals and causes.

Within 15 years of graduating from Emma, Jean argued in front of the US Supreme Court on behalf of Adam Clayton Powell, a Black elected official defending his seat in the US House of Representatives. She won the case, further propelling her to prominence as a legal advocate for the underserved.

In 1970, Jean became the founding director of the Urban Law Institute in Washington, where she spearheaded filings against bus fare increases, rent and slumlord issues, and discriminatory hiring practices in the media—all issues that disproportionately affected Black Americans. The institute was affiliated with George Washington University’s National Law Center and sparked the idea for Jean that law schools must be active participants in mandating fair legal representation. In 1972, Jean and Edgar opened Antioch Law School in Washington to focus on implementing poverty law practices in the American legal discourse. Opening the school made Jean the first Black female founder of a law school and first Black female dean of a law school.

Jean went on to become a Yale Alumni Board member and serve on the executive committee for Yale Law School. She and Edgar were also distinguished visiting scholars in international economics at the London School of Economics in the summer of 1986.

Jean’s legacy ripples through the halls of the institutions she touched. A 1991 issue of Yale Law Review was dedicated to Jean upon her passing, acknowledging her steely dedication to justice: “Jean Cahn well understood the importance of securing rights for America’s poor and disadvantaged, but much of her work focused on creating institutions that would empower the poor to assert their own rights. These institutions, despite resistance from many sides, still exist.”

Jean’s earliest days in her parents’ living room, surrounded by notable Civil Rights leaders, were the first steps in a life of service. Her time at Emma encouraged her to merge social justice with intellectual rigor. In a 1991 convocation speech for Emma Willard students, former head of school Dr. Robin Robertson said of Jean, “(her) ideas were radical, her solutions creative.” The ability to think big and enact tangible solutions is the core of an Emma education, and few have exemplified it for real-world results in the way Jean did.

SNAPSHOT …

50 YEARS AGO

The Great Transformation

Fifty years ago, in the 1971-72 school year, the Great Hall in Slocum was in mid-transformation. The old bookshelves from library days were removed, and the entire hall was stripped bare to be reformed as a space for art exhibitions, recitals, and community gatherings. It was officially re-dedicated as LyonRemington on May 6, 1973.

25 YEARS AGO

The Days that Lie Before Us

In the senior column in The Clock, Sonya Cheuse ’97 wrote: “The transition to college is approaching and I have begun to think long and hard about the days I have spent running through the halls of Slocum, playing field hockey in the last heat of summer, printing photographs in the dark crevices of the art building, lazing about in the dorms, and goofing around in the grassy inner campus. When I close my eyes and recall the past four years, I realize I am going to miss this place—the stone gargoyles, the tunnels that echo and flood, the grass and flowers, this place as a corporeal architectural community—more than I had ever anticipated I would. [...] Let us leave without haste, for the wide-arched sky reflects glimpses of the days that lie before us.”