Memphis Law Fall 2020

ML MEMPHIS LAW MAGAZINE | FALL 2020

President

M. David Rudd

Executive Vice President for University Relations Tammy Hedges

Dean

Katharine T. Schaffzin

Executive Editor Ryan Jones

Contributing Writers

Brad Bennett Ryan Jones Professor Demetria Frank

Photography Jamie Harmon Ziggy Mack

Art Direction and Design

University of Memphis Division for External Relations

Published by

The University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law 1 North Front Street Memphis, TN 38103 901.678.2421 memphis.edu/law To submit story ideas, letters to the editor, alumni updates or for other ML related inquiries, please contact Executive Editor Ryan Jones at rjones1@memphis.edu.

Rachel Jackson CLASS OF 2021 Externship with FedEx Express, Employment Litigation, Employment Law and Commercial See story on page 6

The University of Memphis does not discriminate against students, employees or applicants for admission or employment on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, disability, age, status as a protected veteran, genetic information or any other legally protected class with respect to all employment, programs and activities sponsored by the University of Memphis. The following position has been designated to handle inquiries regarding non-discrimination and anti-harassment policies: Director for Institutional Equity/Title VI Coordinator, oie@memphis.edu, 156 Administration Building, 901.678.2713. The University of Memphis policy on nondiscrimination can be found at https://memphis.policytech.com/dotNet/documents/?docid=430. The University of Memphis Magazine (USPS-662-550) is published four times a year by the Division of External Relations of the University of Memphis, 308 Administration Building, Memphis, TN 38152-3370. Periodical postage paid at Memphis, TN 38152. UOM072-FY2020 6M3C Paulsen

ML MEMPHIS LAW MAGAZINE

12

Pandemic Pivot: A How Memphis Law Shifted This Summer to Focus on Evictions

2

Dean’s Letter

3

News + Events

By Ryan Jones

6

Remotely Possible: A Pandemic Redefines the Legal Externship

By Ryan Jones Photography by Jamie Harmon

T he COVID-19 pandemic forced a near-uniform transition to online teaching and learning, but it didn’t stop the Memphis Law Summer Externship Program from securing a record high 53 real-world placements for students enrolled in the course — all working remotely and some in ways never before thought of in the legal profession.

A look at how our students, faculty and programs shifted to focus on the ongoing problem of evictions during the COVID19 pandemic — from our Medical-Legal Partnership Clinic’s nimble pivot away from work at the hospital, to forming a cross-state partnership with the University of Tennessee Knoxville School of Law, to our ongoing work with community partners to administer a unique Eviction Settlement Program.

16 66 Years After Brown v. Board, Schools Across the South Still Separate and Unequal

By Brad Bennett

THIS ARTICLE IS REPRINTED AND SHARED WITH THE PERMISSION OF THE SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER.

A s we celebrate the 66th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed school segregation and declared that separate schools are inherently unequal, schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods still have fewer resources, fewer counselors and experienced educators, and, overall, lack the level of educational opportunities found in schools in predominantly white neighborhoods.

20 The Battle for the Ballot — the Forgotten History of African American Women and the 19th Amendment

By Ryan Jones

A s we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, many individuals may not be aware of the role that African American women played in the battle for women’s right to vote. This article examines the history of race in the history of the suffrage movement, as well as several important African American women who helped the movement succeed, though history has often forgotten the greatness of their deeds.

28 A n interview with Hon. Bernice B. Donald (JD '79): A Barrier-Breaking Woman Reflects on Our Current Situation and the Road Ahead

By Ryan Jones Photography by Ziggy Mack Judge Bernice Bouie Donald (JD '79) has spent her entire life breaking down barriers and being the “first” to achieve a great many things. The term “trailblazer” does not begin to sum up her self-forged path. In this profile, we learn about her drive to teach others and lift them up, as well as her views on how the current pandemic has influenced the legal profession and the future of legal education.

32 Alumni Notes 34 Faculty Accomplishments 36 Lawyers Need

Cultural Competence

by Professor Demetria Frank

P rofessor Frank weighs in on the importance of lawyer cultural competence, a set of behaviors, attitudes and policies that enable a lawyer to work effectively in cross-cultural situations, especially in diverse systems, agencies and with other professionals.

MEMPHIS L AW | FALL 2020

1

Dean's Letter

Y

ou might be reading this newest issue of ML from your now all-too-familiar home office. Perhaps you’re glancing at it on your phone or laptop as you take a break from the latest of far too many Zoom meetings or conference calls from your home. Life has become a series of adaptations since the spring.

Like everyone, the law school made many unexpected adjustments to protect the health and safety of our community. We received tremendous support from the University of Memphis through its IT infrastructure and training to transition to remote delivery on short notice. Law faculty embraced the challenge presented, underwent training and got to work; in fact, faculty continued additional training throughout the summer.

And while it certainly wasn’t ideal, we participated in the University’s virtual graduation, though we also hope to recognize the Class of 2020 in person when it is safe to do so.

Despite the pandemic, we have been able to develop and offer rich and innovative online programs. Enrollment in our summer externship course reached an all-time high, even while students worked remotely for their assigned placement offices, including field placements with federal and state judges at the appellate and trial court levels; prosecutor and public defenders’ offices; federal and state administrative agencies; health care entities; nonprofit legal services providers, academic institutions and select corporate in-house counsel departments. Additionally, our Clinic and Career Services Office teamed up to offer extensive summer pro bono opportunities, including collaborations with Memphis Area Legal Services, the Tennessee Innocence Project, Tennessee Access2Justice and Tennessee Alliance for Legal Services. Our Medical-Legal Partnership Clinic director and students quickly pivoted and adapted to the pandemic, tackling the issue of unlawful evictions and foreclosures in Tennessee during this pandemic.

And while we faced the many trials and tribulations brought about by the coronavirus, the murder of George Floyd required us to examine our role in institutionalizing racism. I joined the Black Law Students Association for a Listening Forum to hear directly from members of our law school community how they have experienced racism and what we can do to mitigate future harm. The following morning, we participated in the Unity March, organized by the Ben F. Jones Chapter of the National Bar Association, the Memphis Bar Association and the

2

UNIVERSIT Y OF MEMPHIS

Association for Women Attorneys. Together, we are working to plan a path forward in fostering a culture of diversity, inclusion and cultural competence.

Delivery of our fall curriculum looks quite different this year. Limited seating capacities have necessarily prevented us from proceeding as usual. Many law classes continue to meet in person in a familiar manner, albeit adjusted in consideration of social distancing and mask requirements. Some other courses are being offered entirely online, where the faculty member has determined that this is the best pedagogical choice in light of the limitations placed on the use of space

by COVID-19. A few courses are offered as hybrid courses, with some scheduled classes meeting online and others meeting in person. Others are being offered as hyflex, with approximately one half of the class meeting in person while others participate in the same class remotely; students rotate into the in-person class on specified days pursuant to an established schedule.

So while our expressions may be hidden behind our masks, we are still the same friendly and available staff, diligent and driven students, hardworking faculty committed to excellent teaching and strong law school community that we have always been. And despite a worldwide pandemic, we’ve managed to embrace educational innovation and develop new partnerships in service of our community. We are not the same law school we were last year; we have grown stronger. To those who ask if this is a good time to go to law school, I answer that society cannot wait for more creative problem-solvers, policymakers and social justice advocates empowered to change the world. So yes, it’s a great time to go to law school.

Best Regards,

DE A N KATH A R I N E T. SCHAFFZ I N

PROFESSOR ANDREW McCLURG RETIREMENT

News + Events

PROFESSOR DESHUN HARRIS NAMED PRESIDENT OF THE ASSOCIATION OF ACADEMIC SUPPORT EDUCATORS Assistant professor and director of bar preparation DeShun Harris was recently appointed as president of the Association of Academic Support Educators.

PROFESSOR REGINA HILLMAN REUNITES WITH OBERGEFELL V. HODGES LEGAL TEAM FOR TBA LGBT FORUM Memphis Law professor Regina Hillman reunited with a legal team she was previously a part of that assisted with and argued the Obergefell v. Hodges case in the U.S. Supreme Court five years ago as part of this year’s Tennessee Bar Association’s LGBT Annual Forum in June.

The day’s entire program was devoted to this landmark decision, and the entire legal team that argued the case took part in the program to discuss and give insight into the case, the preparations and the proceedings.

After 34 years of teaching, professor Andrew McClurg has announced he will retire at the end of the Fall 2020 semester.

Professor McClurg has served as a professor and Herbert Herff Chair of Excellence at Memphis Law for the past 14 years, where he built upon his already well-established reputation as a nationally recognized teacher and scholar who has published books and articles in the areas of legal education, privacy law, firearms law and policy, comparative law, wrongful death, logic and rhetoric, elder financial exploitation, health law and products liability.

For years, Professor McClurg diligently served as the University of Memphis Law Review Faculty Advisor. Additionally, he received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2009-10 and the 2009 Excellence in Legal Education Award, as well as five other teaching awards (including four Teacher of the Year Awards) at Memphis Law. While at the law school, he has also received three law school excellence awards for research, most recently the Farris Bobango Award for Faculty Scholarship in 2017.

MEMPHIS LAW STUDENTS AWARDED CLEA OUTSTANDING CLINICAL TEAM AWARD Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law recent graduates Corey Davis, Rachael Ledbetter and C.J. Parrish were awarded the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) Outstanding Clinical Team Award for their work in the Medical-Legal Partnership Clinic during the 2019-20 academic year. CLEA recognizes law student teams who have excelled in clinical fieldwork in law school by providing high-quality representation to clients; who have engaged in exceptionally thoughtful, self-reflective participation in an accompanying clinic seminar; and who have effectively collaborated and made positive contributions to the clinical community at the law school. This team of students was recognized for, among other things, their zealous advocacy on behalf of a client whose terminally ill child was at risk of losing her at-home nurse provided through TennCare, Tennessee's Medicaid program.

MEMPHIS LAW 3-PEATS AS BEST LAW SCHOOL BUILDING The Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law has (again) been ranked No. 1 on preLaw Magazine's list of BEST Law School Buildings in the nation. This is the third time that Memphis Law has taken top spot, following a 2014 “Best Law School Facilities" in the country award and 2018 “Best Buildings and Law School Facilities" ranking in the same publication.

MEMPHIS L AW | FALL 2020

3

News + Events

INAUGURAL WES FOWLER “BEST ORAL ADVOCATE” AWARD Briana Butler is the first recipient of the Wes Fowler Best Oral Advocate Award. Butler was named Best Oral Advocate of the First-Year Moot Court competition earlier this year. She will receive a partial scholarship, which was funded by friends and family of Wes Fowler, who won this same award at the law school in 1995.

PROFESSOR ERNIE LIDGE RETIREMENT After more than three decades of distinguished service to the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law, professor Ernie Lidge retired at the end of the 2019-20 academic year. Lidge joined the law school in 1988 after years of successful practice at Mayer, Brown & Platt in Chicago. In joining the law school community, Lidge returned to his true passion as an educator, having taught social studies at Glenbrook North High School in Glenbrook, Ill., before pursuing a law degree. Since that time, he has taught labor/employment law and legal ethics to thousands of University of Memphis law students who have come to appreciate his commitment to teaching excellence.

WELCOME TO VISITING PROFESSOR RONNIE GIPSON Memphis Law welcomed Ronnie Gipson to the law school faculty as a visiting assistant professor of law this fall. Professor Gipson previously served on the faculty at Soongsil University in Seoul, South Korea, where he taught a variety of courses in the school's Global Law Program. He then taught Torts, Criminal Law, International Law, International Business Transactions, International Trade Law and Remedies at the University of La Verne College of Law in Ontario, Calif. Prior to transitioning into academia, Gipson was a grader of essay questions for the California Bar Exam for five years.

4

UNIVERSIT Y OF MEMPHIS

2019-20 IRVIN BOGATIN SERVICE AWARD WINNER Recent Memphis Law graduate Brian Rees was awarded the 2019-20 Irvin Bogatin Service Award, which is presented annually to a student who exemplifies the fulfillment of an attorney’s responsibility to provide access to justice for low-income individuals and to advance the cause of social justice. Rees was a student in the Elder Law Clinic in 2019 and won the CALI award for that clinic for the semester.

Additionally, he served as the president of the Public Action Law Society (PALS) during the 2019-20 year and was instrumental in sponsoring a showing of the statewide Senior Trust “Aging Matters” video and a Q&A session with Certified Elder Law attorney Pam Wright dealing with legal issues facing older adults to the Memphis Law community. Additionally, he was enrolled in the Spring 2020 semester in the Advanced Elder Law Clinic where he was an outstanding mentor to students and continued to engage in client representation. Finally, Rees embarked on a project paper dealing with the legal basis and policy implications of filial responsibility laws within Tennessee's TennCare program.

MEMPHIS LAW REVIEW VOL. 51 EDITORIAL BOARD ANNOUNCED EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Rebecca Payton MANAGING EDITOR: Dairanetta Spain SENIOR ARTICLES EDITOR: Jackson Stoner SENIOR NOTES EDITOR: Claire Rowland SYMPOSIUM EDITOR: John Taylor RESEARCH EDITOR: Lindsay Castellaw BUSINESS & MEDIA EDITOR: Morgan Crocker

ARTICLES EDITORS:

Devon Spriddle Kristen Lilly Christina McConnell Leah Yoder Mary Clark

NOTE EDITORS:

Katelyn Dagen Evan Johnson Jamie Gibber Sierra Knight Malik Luckett Louis Bernsen

“IN THE ABSENCE” DOCUMENTARY FEATURES MEMPHIS LAW CLINIC STUDENTS The law school’s Neighborhood Preservation Clinic and its students were featured in the documentary In the Absence, which focused on the problem of long-term disinvestment in core city neighborhoods and explored some of the innovative strategies that Memphis uses to address the effects of that disinvestment. The documentary premiered at the 2019 Indie Memphis film festival and focuses on the work of law school partner organization Neighborhood Preservation, Inc.

MEMPHIS LAW HOSTS ABA 19TH AMENDMENT TRAVELING EXHIBIT Memphis Law proudly hosted the American Bar Association's 19th Amendment traveling exhibit, “100 Years After the 19th Amendment: Their Legacy, and Our Future,” in late August, corresponding with the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment.

MEMPHIS LAW TOP 25 IN NATION FOR JDs AWARDED TO AFRICAN AMERICANS Memphis Law was recently ranked in the Top 25 nationally for “Law Degrees Awarded to African-Americans” in Diverse Education Magazine’s rankings of the Top 100 Producers of Minority Graduate Degrees.

BEST LAW SCHOOL TO LAND A CLERKSHIP? MEMPHIS LAW IS TOP 25 Memphis Law was recently ranked 21st in the nation for Federal Judicial Clerkship placements in the Federal Judicial Clerkship Report of Recent Law School Graduates 2020 edition. The data pertains to classes 2017-19.

U.S. NEWS RANKS MEMPHIS LAW CLINICAL TRAINING & LEGAL WRITING PROGRAMS The University of Memphis School of Law had two specialty programs recognized and prominently ranked by U.S. News & World Report in its latest 2021 rankings.

Our Legal Writing and Clinical Training Programs were ranked No. 38 and No. 69 respectively.

PRO BONO SUMMER PROGRAM SUCCESS The law school was proud to have a number of pro bono programs and opportunities available to students over the summer, as many summer jobs were delayed or left unfilled due to the pandemic. The law school and Memphis Area Legal Services (MALS) partnered to provide new MALS Summer Fellowships for our students.

The Tennessee Supreme Court Access to Justice Commission and its partners also launched the Tennessee A2J Summer Fellows Program, a project to connect law students with pro bono opportunities across the state, which several Memphis Law students participated in. Additionally, our students had the opportunity to obtain an internship with the Tennessee Alliance for Legal Services Summer 2020 Virtual Volunteer Program.

Finally, the law school was proud to have three Memphis Law students participating in the Tennessee Innocence Project collaboration with Bass, Berry & Sims with their West Tennessee attorney Danielle Dudding Irvine as the University’s inaugural Pro Bono Summer Program Fellows.

LAW REVIEW CALL FOR PAPERS The University of Memphis Law Review has opened the call for papers and presenters for its 2021 Symposium, “Diagnosing America’s Healthcare System: Addressing Costs and Access NOW,” tentatively scheduled for March 5, 2021.

Visit memphis.edu/law for more information.

MEMPHIS L AW | FALL 2020

5

Remotely Possible A PA N D E M I C R E D E F I N E S THE LEGAL EXTERNSHIP

6

UNIVERSIT Y OF MEMPHIS

Miguel Rocha

CLASS OF 2021

Externship with the Community Legal Center, Immigration Justice Program “I’ve had endless hours of Zoom meetings and phone conferences. Technology was a huge part of this externship experience, with applications such as Zoom, WhatsApp, Skype and others all being used throughout the day. But there were instances where the technology would fail and I quickly learned that we had to continue our work because clients needed our help — with or without the technology at-hand.

My hope is that remote working conditions and technology will continue to be a part of our future legal system as a result of this pandemic, because there are numerous benefits that improve our justice system and make it more accessible to everyday citizens.”

By Ryan Jones Photography by Jamie Harmon

MEMPHIS L AW | FALL 2020

7

8

UNIVERSIT Y OF MEMPHIS

T

THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC forced a near-uniform transition to online teaching and learning, but it didn’t stop the Memphis Law Summer Externship Program from securing a record high 53 real-world placements for students enrolled in the course.

CLASS OF 2021 (Cover)

For years, the Externship Program, and those like it at law schools across the country, has been set up with the traditional structure of the law school relying on a supervisor in the court, law firm or business to make sure the law student extern in the placement has interesting, meaningful work, representative of what they would find in the real workplace one day.

Externship with the Tennessee Innocence Project

This has also always meant an office at the physical location of the externship itself.

“Working remotely has made me more creative and independent. I’ve found that rather than immediately asking a colleague for help or sending an email asking for prompt assistance, that working remotely has helped me attempt to find solutions on my own first. This has helped me to think more critically about issues and develop creative solutions to problems, which I believe are essential skills for all attorneys in the workplace.”

But as law offices across the country closed, courts went online, and attorneys began to work from home because of the coronavirus; there were concerns about the future of this extremely important experiential learning opportunity.

Alexa Dennis

Professor Danny Schaffzin, director of the law school’s experiential learning program, rose to the challenge and managed to convince attorneys, courts and clerks to do something they’d mostly never done before — supervise and monitor an extern remotely, while allowing them to work on matters that at times had never before been practiced remotely. Reaching out to every externship supervisor in the program, Schaffzin secured more placements this year than last (53) and even found five brand-new externship placements for Memphis Law students.

These are five of the Memphis Law students who took part in this groundbreaking summer externship program and the environments they’ve embraced as their remote workspaces throughout this pandemic.

Their experiences will pave the way for students and attorneys as the legal world moves through and beyond the pandemic.

MEMPHIS L AW | FALL 2020

9

Judith Denham CLASS OF 2021

Externship with Justice Holly M. Kirby, Tennessee Supreme Court

“When I first learned I would be working outside of the traditional office, I anticipated that the whole of my externship experience would proceed remotely.

I did not expect to have the opportunity to witness two rounds of oral arguments before the Tennessee Supreme Court, but in an effort to adjust to our current circumstances, the Tennessee Supreme Court held oral arguments remotely for the first time ever via Zoom. I was able to be physically present (but safely distant) in Justice Kirby’s chambers while she presided over these cases.

Observing her navigate this new platform was a great chance to witness firsthand the adaptability and efficiency of judicial process and procedure.”

10

UNIVERSIT Y OF MEMPHIS

Katelyn Dagen CLASS OF 2021

Externship with Judge Bernice Donald, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit “The remote aspect of this summer's externship actually fits nicely into a theme I have found in law school: being pushed out of my comfort zone and presented with complex issues that require problem-solving. These unprecedented times have enhanced my ability to think critically and independently when faced with challenges. I am sure that my experiences this summer will inform my future studies and work as a lawyer.”

Rachel Jackson CLASS OF 2021

Externship with FedEx Express, Employment Litigation, Employment Law and Commercial “When I first found out that I’d be working remotely, I thought I’d be pretty much ‘on my own.’ But I don’t feel ‘on my own’ at all. I never expected that I would feel as incorporated into the FedEx department as I am. I feel a part of the office, just in a different location. It’s been so useful to have technology that allows for instant communication, and everyone there has really made me feel like a part of a team.”

MEMPHIS L AW | FALL 2020

11

A P P H O T O B Y A NDR E W H A R NIK

A PANDEMIC PIVOT How Memphis Law shifted this summer to focus on evictions

By Ryan Jones

NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF INVENTION, as they say. That certainly holds true for the many Memphis Law programs, clinics, courses, students, faculty and staff as they have dealt with the unprecedented challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic.

N

When colleges and universities across the state announced the cancellation of in-person classes due to the COVID-19 pandemic, law professors and students were scrambling to find out how their classes would continue.

Perhaps none more so than those involved in Memphis Law's Medical-Legal Partnership (MLP) Clinic at Le Bonheur Children's Hospital. Not only was the work currently being done with patients now put on hold, but all future cases at Le Bonheur were going to be put off for at least the rest of the semester.

Professor Katy Ramsey, director of the MLP Clinic, wanted to find a meaningful way to help her students take on a health-related response directly tied to this health crisis.

"I had recently been a part of several conversations about what other states and local jurisdictions were doing with regards to evictions," Ramsey said. "There had started to be a trend of governors, mayors and local leaders imposing moratoriums on evictions while this crisis is ongoing."

12

UNIVERSIT Y OF MEMPHIS

"We were looking at both a health crisis and an economic crisis here," she said. "In an economic crisis, people are less likely to be able to pay their bills and rent. We've been told that the remedy to this health crisis is to stay at home. So it's very inconsistent to think that we could both be allowing numerous evictions to proceed, which ultimately results in higher degrees of homelessness, while also asking people to stay at home and socially isolate."

In short, the higher numbers of evictions were going to result in higher rates of COVID-19 cases.

These eviction and foreclosure legal proceedings had to be halted in order to protect vulnerable citizens during this pandemic and mitigate further community transmission.

It's estimated that anywhere from 20 to 28 million American renters are dangerously close to eviction. Even before COVID-19 hit the country, America faced the worst housing crisis in a century. According to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, 20.5 million families already struggled to pay the rent, with only one in four eligible renter households receiving financial assistance.

According to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, four evictions were filed every minute in 2016, when the national unemployment rate was 4.7%. As of this writing, unemployment is close to three times that level.

Reinforcing the massive toll that the pandemic has had on renters, the University of California, Berkeley Terner Center for Housing Innovation estimates that 50 million renters live in households that suffered COVID-19 related job or income loss, with almost 40% occurring in low-income households. The demand for financial assistance is at an all-time high, with a 92% increase in daily rental assistance requests and food pantry requests increasing by as much as 2,000% in some states.

Rose Logan

Many states, including Tennessee, enacted a patchwork of temporary eviction moratoriums and the federal government also issued a partial ban on evictions. However, these quickly expiring moratoriums will soon no longer protect homeowners and tenants unable to make their payments because of COVID-19 lockdowns. Many of these orders

have begun to expire already, with even more scheduled to do so after this magazine goes to print. Once they do, residents are facing a possible flood of non-payment legal actions. The COVID-19 Eviction Defense Project (CEDP) predicted recently that by the end of September, more than 20 million U.S. renters — many of them Black and Latino located in big cities — will be at risk for eviction.

Heather Bornstein

To put this in even greater perspective, Emily Benfer, chair of the American Bar Association’s Task Force Committee on Eviction and co-creator of the COVID-19 Housing Policy Scorecard with the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, recently told CNBC, “We have never seen this extent of eviction in such a truncated amount of time in our history.”

With the need for help extremely evident, Ramsey started reaching out to legal aid organizations and fellow practitioners across the state. Her research eventually led her to the University of Tennessee College of Law and Professor Wendy Bach, director of the Advocacy Clinic at UTK Law. "I was looking for something meaningful for our students to take on that was a direct response to this

P HO T O B Y JON AT H A N MC IN T O S H

Emily Benfer

“We can expect this to increase dramatically in the coming weeks and months, especially as the limited support and intervention measures that are in place start to expire,” Benfer elaborated. “About 10 million people, over a period of years, were displaced from their homes following the foreclosure crisis in 2008. We’re looking at 20 to 28 million people in this moment, between now and September, facing eviction.”

crisis," Bach said. "Legal services attorneys are facing a wave of eviction-related work. There is a moratorium on eviction proceedings now. But when that's lifted, the number of people dealing with these situations will skyrocket. And the proceedings will move very fast."

The two professors began to think about how their crossstate clinics and students could work together on the problem. In doing so, they realized that their actual inperson clinic classes were scheduled on the same exact date and time, which meant they could combine their efforts and bring all of their students together virtually — using Zoom sessions — to find answers to our state's larger eviction issues related to the COVID-19 crisis.

MEMPHIS L AW | FALL 2020

13

T

"Tennessee does not have strong tenant protection laws, so evictions are always a problem and tenants don't have a lot of recourse," Ramsey said.

The overall course morphed into a sort of three-part project around evictions — a statewide survey project; the drafting of model pleadings for attorneys to use as templates; and a communications group that researched policy, drafted recommendations for change, wrote op-ed pieces for local newspapers and put together FAQ and "Know Your Rights" documents for those in need, both attorneys and tenants.

County courts in Tennessee have discretion about whether they will accept eviction filings during this time, and sheriffs can interpret how they want to proceed with executing writs that were issued prior to court closures throughout the state. So, the clinics brought on a third partner in the Tennessee Alliance for Legal Services (TALS) to tackle the survey portion of the project.

they drafted model pleadings and model answers for attorneys to use as templates in these eviction cases.

"We heard from several legal aid attorneys that they used these pleadings immediately and prevented evictions based on the research that the students did, which was really awesome," said Ramsey.

The model answers were drafted in anticipation of the flood of eviction filings that occur when courts reopen.

"We wanted to give legal aid attorneys around the state, as well as possibly pro se tenants, a template that listed out legitimate defenses and counter-claims, that they would have immediate access to that they might

"The information was important for TALS to have when they received calls to their helpline," UT Professor Bach said. "They wanted to be able to accurately answer questions for clients about how to best deal with situations in their home counties."

Secondly, the students undertook a "pleadings" portion of the project where

14

UNIVERSIT Y OF MEMPHIS

"Because there is no precedent from any state on eviction moratoriums, it was really difficult to understand the effects of having one," Bornstein said. "What we do know is NOT having one has disastrous effects."

"We looked into what happened during the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918, and if what happened then carries over to today, we're about to have a significant housing crisis," Tennessee College of Law student Allen Heaston said.

All of this fast-moving change as a result of COVID-19 could have torpedoed the learning of some students and their classes. But those in this unique adaptation found the experience enlightening and fruitful.

Students from the Spring 2019 MLP Clinic

Students from the two schools developed a set of standardized questions and called sheriff's offices, general sessions courts and court clerks offices in the 95 counties across the State of Tennessee, where they asked these questions in order to determine how evictions were being handled in each county.

Memphis Law student Heather Bornstein is president of the law school's Health Law Society and was a student in this innovative new evolution of the MLP Clinic. She and her partner at UT, Allen Heaston, researched past pandemics like the Spanish Flu, where these sorts of policies were not implemented, and the results were dire.

not normally have the time or resources to put together," noted Ramsey.

Students in the communications section of the project took a more public-facing approach to the problem by researching policy issues and eviction laws in relation to public health emergencies and then drafting opinion pieces for local news outlets detailing why people should care about eviction issues and why there ought to be a longer moratorium on evictions during this crisis. Additionally, these clinic students spent time crafting "Know Your Rights" and FAQ informational pieces for tenants to help them know what to expect when going through this process.

"I've learned so much from having the opportunity to continue our clinic work remotely," said Memphis Law student and clinic participant Rose Logan. "Zealous advocacy includes being prepared, flexible and innovative and being a student-attorney during this crisis has empowered me to think outside of the box to remain diligent about my future casework and clients."

"This was obviously very different work than our students anticipated at the beginning of the semester," Ramsey said. "But it was also very impactful and real work.�

“Long-term, if we can institutionalize this partnership with the courts, the law school and Memphis Area Legal Services … we are going to catch even more people who are falling through the cracks.”

According to attorney Webb Brewer, a longtime advocate for tenants and homeowners facing foreclosure in Memphis, this entire program is unique.

Brewer is working as a consultant on the project and is helping to train the law students and attorneys participating in the program.

EVICTION SETTLEMENT PROGRAM After the groundwork was laid by our MLP Clinic and its eviction-related work, local Memphis and Shelby County government, courts, and legal and housing organizations coordinated a new $2 million program designed to limit pandemic-related evictions.

But this new Eviction Settlement Program (ESP) is also an attempt to address the issue of housing insecurity in a different manner that could help reduce the area’s homelessness issue going forward.

The ESP provides free legal representation to tenants facing eviction because of lost income due pandemic-related illness, business closure/job loss, lack of childcare, or death or illness of a close family member with COVID-19. The University of Memphis School of Law Legal Clinic provides legal representation alongside attorneys from Memphis Area Legal Services. Through law school legal clinic professors Katy Ramsey and Danny Schaffzin, the Legal Clinic is partnering with a core group of organization including Neighborhood Preservation Inc., Memphis Area Legal Services, Innovate Memphis, Shelby County and the City of Memphis to design the

program. Shelby County and the City of Memphis together are seeding the program, including the significant pool money to negotiate preeviction settlements through the allocation of federal CARES Act funds each has received.

Nearly 30 local attorneys, including professors Ramsey and Schaffzin, as well as Alex Bissell, the law school’s Medical-Legal Clinic staff attorney, represent tenant-clients through the program. Additionally, approximately 15 volunteer Memphis Law students have been training and will participate under the supervision of the volunteer attorneys.

A uniquely innovative part is how this program fills a gap in the way issues of housing insecurity have traditionally been addressed.

Pre-eviction programs have long existed for tenants struggling to pay rent, director of Shelby County Community Services Dorcas Young Griffin recently told The Daily Memphian in a related interview. “Now we have a relationship in the court where in real time we can see the cases coming through and we can intervene with the landlord and tenant and say, ‘Hey, we have a way we can settle this, keep this person stable and (the landlord) will get some money.’ We have not had that gap filled with the court,” she said.

“This is not ‘We’ll pay your rent for two or three months if you meet these criteria,’” Brewer said in a recent interview with The Daily Memphian. “This is much more tailored, and we’ll be trying to negotiate and get landlords to accept some of the pain if they have a guarantee of receiving X amount of money and a commitment the tenant will pay X amount.”

With the looming uptick in the housing crisis across the country due to the COVID-19, innovative programs like this are going to be models for how to successfully help those in need of safe and reliable housing throughout this pandemic and beyond. It’s also the sort of nimble and unique collaboration and programming that law schools, including Memphis Law, will be able to utilize in educating and training future attorneys in these ever-changing times.

“I am hopeful this ESP will help us during COVID-19,” said Young Griffin, director of Shelby County Community Services. “But I actually think we have birthed a potential best practice for after COVID as well.”

Communities across the country had a housing security problem long before this recent pandemic, but with tools and programs like these, and with willing partners like the University of Memphis School of Law, the way forward seems slightly more encouraging.

MEMPHIS L AW | FALL 2020

15

16

UNIVERSIT Y OF MEMPHIS

66 Years After Brown v. Board Schools Across the South Still Separate and Unequal resources, fewer counselors and experienced educators, and overall lack the level of educational opportunities found in schools in predominantly white neighborhoods.

APRYLE YOUNG HAS SEEN the water dripping from the ceiling and the rats that hide in the walls at her children’s schools in Memphis.

There’s no air-conditioning on hot days and no heat on cold days. What’s more, there are not enough textbooks; teachers have to make copies of the relevant pages. But when Young’s daughter has problems with her homework at night, she needs the whole textbook, not just a few pages.

Though we recently commemorated the 66th anniversary of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed school segregation and declared that separate schools are inherently unequal, schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods like Young’s have fewer

As the nation observes the anniversary of the Brown decision, schools are becoming more segregated, not less, experts say.

What’s more, children of color are caught in the “school-to-prison pipeline” — the harsh cycle of policies, practices and procedures that, directly or indirectly, push children out of schools and into the criminal and immigrant justice systems — at much higher rates than white children.

“There’s still no equality in education,” said Young, a plaintiff in a lawsuit from the Southern Poverty Law Center to keep public money in two Tennessee school districts instead of diverting the funds to unaccountable private schools. “To me, it’s still a form of segregation.”

By Brad Bennett This article is reprinted with permission from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

the Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional,” said Christine Bischoff, senior staff attorney for the SPLC’s Children’s Rights Practice Group. “School closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic across the country have laid bare inequities in education that persist today, as we see low-income children and children of color in particular struggle to access the resources they need —like computers and the internet — to continue their learning during this time.

“Some children are not receiving any special education services while schools are closed, and others struggle to access school meals during this unprecedented time,” she said. “As Brown affirmed 66 years ago – and it still holds true today — separate but equal is not equal.

Each of us must continue to work every single day to fulfill the promise of Brown so that all children in our country have equal opportunities to attend and thrive in high-quality, diverse schools.”

The SPLC is pushing back against racial inequities in education across the South by fighting to keep public money in public schools, dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline and advocating for thriving public schools in every community.

After the Brown decision, many Southern states established publiclyfunded private school voucher schemes to get around courtordered integration. Today, voucher programs persist across the South and continue to be an obstacle to equal opportunities for all children to learn.

“The Brown v. Board of Education decision is as critical today as it was 66 years ago when

In Tennessee, the SPLC and its partners recently won a big victory for parents

MEMPHIS L AW | FALL 2020

17

serve the vast majority of students — including the majority of Black students — in our country.

and children in predominantly Black school districts when a judge struck down a voucher program that would have drained money from public schools and given it to private schools that are not legally bound by the civil rights protections required in public schools.

The victory highlighted the SPLC’s efforts to keep public money in public schools. The Public Funds Public Schools (PFPS) campaign, which launched last year, is a partnership of the SPLC, the SPLC Action Fund, the Education Law Center (ELC) and Munger, Tolles & Olson.

PFPS works to ensure that public funds for education are dedicated to public schools, which

18

UNIVERSIT Y OF MEMPHIS

In a lawsuit against Mississippi, the SPLC argues that the state has repeatedly violated a nearly 150-year-old, legally binding federal law that prohibited the state from diminishing the education rights enshrined in the state constitution ratified in 1869, which included the requirement to operate a “uniform system of free public schools” for all children. This obligation was placed on the state as a condition of rejoining the Union after the Civil War. As schools in communities of color across the South suffer from severe underfunding and harmful policies and practices, the SPLC works to ensure equitable opportunities for students of color to learn, grow and thrive. In Alabama, the SPLC sued a school district for violating the due process rights of two Black teenagers expelled from high school and arrested after a cellphone was mistaken for a gun.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to expose these deep inequities, the SPLC is working to keep children out of juvenile detention — a place where Black and Latinx children are overrepresented. The SPLC recently won the release of a Black girl from youth detention to protect her from the coronavirus. The girl had been arrested at school following an incident involving a cellphone. The SPLC is currently seeking to free more children from youth detention during the pandemic.

The SPLC and other children’s advocates are also urging state leaders in Louisiana, Florida, Mississippi and Alabama to use the millions of dollars the states are receiving in federal emergency funding for the pandemic to eliminate educational inequities among children and families disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 school closures, including students of color.

STILL SEPARATE BUT UNEQUAL The unanimous Brown ruling declared in 1954 that racial segregation in public schools was a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. In the ruling, the court emphasized that education was “perhaps the most important function of state and local governments” and that school desegregation was necessary for the integration of our society as a whole.

Despite those sobering statistics, the Brown decision did have positive, lasting effects, according to Daniel Kiel, a professor of law at the University of Memphis whose work centers on inequality in the educational system.

In the years that followed, federal judges held hundreds of desegregation hearings; the National Guard was deployed to protect nine Black students integrating Central High School in Little Rock; tens of thousands marched on Washington in support of integration; and Congress passed landmark civil rights legislation.

But white students are also doing better in those areas, he said.

But in recent years, the nation’s schools have resegregated.

More than half of the nation’s schoolchildren are in racially concentrated school districts, where over 75% of the students are either white or of color. Many districts in the South remain under federal desegregation orders today. As private school voucher programs have expanded, racial and economic segregation has widened gaps between lowincome students and wealthier students, and between white students and students of color.

The SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance project found that “the average Black student attended a school that was 48.8% Black and 27.6% white.

On the flip side, the average white student attended a school that was 72.5% white and only 8.3% Black.”

“On pretty much every measure, African Americans are doing better than they were in 1954,” Kiel said, citing higher rates of high school graduation, college enrollment and college degrees.

The question, he said, is not how much progress has been made since the Brown decision, but how much equity has been attained since then.

“In terms of pretty much every measure, the quality in education, the equity in education, is still tilted against African American students,” he said.

For Black students, there are fewer financial resources and lower quality in terms of school curricula and experienced educators.

What’s more, discipline is more severe for Black students than for white students, Kiel said.

“FRIGHTENINGLY SIMILAR” TO 1954 “It still tilts very much against African American students in a way that is frighteningly similar to the way that it was in 1954,” Kiel said. “I do think that Brown was highly important to remove the legal mandate [for segregated schools] … but the last six decades show us that simply getting the legal mandate out of the law isn’t enough to make things equal.”

Legal segregation has been replaced by policies over the years that resegregated schools without explicitly using race. Those policies centered on school district boundaries, attendance zones within school districts, tracking students into higher-level classes within schools while leaving others behind and differences in the way Black and white children are disciplined in classrooms.

especially when it comes to our current administration, because it seems like they’re wanting to separate it more.”

Those kinds of decisions are harder to fight than a law overtly mandating separate schools for Black and white children, Kiel said.

The SPLC’s Civil Rights Memorial features this timeline on a circular granite table outside the SPLC’s Montgomery, Ala., headquarters that bears the names of 40 martyrs who died during the civil rights movement. There is space on the Memorial after the line marking King’s death — an acknowledgment that there is still more work to do to achieve full racial equality.

“A large part of the issue in the way that Black children are educated is around the control of dollars and how those funds get distributed equitably or not,” said Cardell Orrin, an education advocate in Tennessee who works with parents, educators and community members. “That comes down to a resource issue that is still reflected today in terms of how we invest in our students, particularly those who have the highest needs.”

Young, the mother whose children attend Tennessee schools that don’t have enough textbooks, agreed with Kiel’s and Orrin’s assessments. By advocating for private school vouchers, she said, the Trump administration’s Department of Education is looking to take more money from poorly resourced public schools around the country that have majority Black populations, and give it to private schools that are mostly white.

“I don’t think we’ve made a lot of progress” since the Brown decision, Young said. “I think at this point we’re going backward,

“MUCH FURTHER TO GO” Many historians regard the Brown decision in 1954 as the beginning of the modern civil rights movement, and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 as the end of the movement.

“On the 66th anniversary of the Brown v. Board decision, we pause to reflect on how far we have come since the law mandated ‘separate but equal’ schools that were far from equal in the way that they educated Black and white children,” said Tafeni English, director of the Civil Rights Memorial Center.

“Today, we look back on that Supreme Court decision in 1954 and, while de jure segregation may be a thing of the past, we continue to see deepening racial and economic resegregation in schools,” English said. “When we look at the way our children are being educated today, we can clearly see that we have much farther to go to achieve racial parity in schools, so the march for racial justice and equality continues.”

MEMPHIS L AW | FALL 2020

19

The Battle for the Ballot The Forgotten History of African American Women and the 19th Amendment

By Ryan Jones

M 20

UNIVERSIT Y OF MEMPHIS

OST INDIVIDUALS READING this are probably well aware that this year marks the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

Many readers may also know about Tennessee’s crucial role in the process, with the state serving as the 36th and final state needed to make women’s suffrage the law of the land.

But what is not more widely known is the role African American women played in this battle for the vote. Race was a major factor in history largely omitting the work of these women in the culture’s memory of the suffrage movement, even though the dedication, achievements and tireless efforts of Black suffragists greatly shaped the fight for women’s rights.

Black women, who were eager and willing to join white women to push for their right to vote, were often relegated to the fringes of the suffrage movement and quite frequently were denied the simple act of having a voice in the discussion, even by suffragists themselves.

Ida B. Wells

MEMPHIS L AW | FALL 2020

21

AS

AS WE RECOGNIZE and celebrate the centennial anniversary of the 19th Amendment, much of the forgotten history surrounding its origins and ratification is beginning to resurface. Stories about the tireless efforts of these African American women are finally starting to find new outlets and platforms across the country. In fact, an “Equality Trailblazers” suffrage monument is planned for the area directly behind the University of Memphis School of Law later this year. The large-scale monument will honor 13 individuals, among them several African American women with ties to Memphis who were vitally important to the suffrage movement in Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, both of whom also suffered racist treatment at the hands of white women in the larger suffrage organizations and movement.

As we begin to look back at this historic celebration that will be commemorated on the law school’s back steps, it is an opportune time to also help tell the stories of some of the forgotten figures that were instrumental to the success of the suffrage movement and its ability to propel women forward in society.

THE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE The most commonly accepted history of the women’s suffrage movement centers around Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton — two white women who played influential roles in the 19th century struggle for women’s suffrage — and usually begins with the 1848 women’s rights convention held in Seneca Falls, N.Y. For the next 50 years after that Seneca Falls convention, we have been taught that under the leadership of Anthony and Stanton, and many other women’s rights pioneers, suffragists banded together to hold conventions, circulate petitions and lobby Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to enfranchise women. And while this is

22

UNIVERSIT Y OF MEMPHIS

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

true, it does not tell the whole story. As the 20th century progressed, leadership of the suffrage movement was set by two national organizations', the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the National Woman’s Party (NWP). The organizations’ memberships numbered in the millions, and the two groups’ combined efforts are largely credited in history as being the reason the 19th Amendment was finally ratified. The victory of the movement, with leaders such as Anthony, Stanton, Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, is widely considered to be the most significant achievement of women in the Progressive Era and was the single

largest extension of democratic voting rights in our nation’s history, peacefully achieved through democratic means.

“The traditional narrative does often leave out large groups of women who don’t fit into the white, middle-class story of women’s rights,” Earnestine Jenkins, professor of art and researcher of African American history at the UofM, said in a recent USA Today article. “You have to be honest about the racism in the movement and the extent they kept women of color out of the movement … You have to look for those hidden histories, because otherwise you are not going to get the complete story.”

COMMON CAUSE, AT FIRST The entire movement had a good deal more common ground early on than where it eventually ended up.

From the earliest years of the suffrage movement, Black women worked side by side with white suffragists and abolitionists. In the turmoil of the Civil War, as the country tore itself apart over Black rights, the strong ties and parallels between the situations of slaves and that of women became evident.

The U.S. women’s rights movement was closely allied with the antislavery movement at the time and, even before the Civil War, Black and white abolitionists and suffragists joined together in “common cause.” In the years before the war, usually referred to as the Antebellum period, a small coalition of formerly enslaved and free Black women, including Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Maria W. Stewart, Mary Ann Shadd Cary and others, were active in women’s rights circles. They were even joined in their advocacy of suffrage and women’s rights by well-known Black men of the time, including Frederick Douglass and Robert Purvis. At that time, they were even working alongside and in collaboration with white abolitionists and white women’s rights activists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Throughout the 1850s and 60s, following the 1848 Seneca Falls convention, many prominent free Black women, abolitionists and suffragists attended, spoke and assumed leadership positions at multiple women’s rights gatherings.

But after the Civil War, the arguments for women’s suffrage became entangled with the widespread debates over the rights of former slaves and the meaning of “citizenship.”

It became increasingly clear post-Civil War that Black and white woman in the U.S. had different views of why it was essential to have the right to vote. Black women, many of whom were still in the South, were seeking the right to the ballot for themselves and Black men in their lives, as a way of empowering post-Civil War Black communities that were still being harassed by acts of racial terror which became widespread after emancipation.

White women, on the other hand, were seeking the vote as a symbol of equality with the white men in society.

The differences and rifts between the groups came to a head in the period leading up to the 15th Amendment, which seemingly gave Black men the right to vote by barring states from denying them the ability to do so.

MORE HIDDEN HEROES Sojourner Truth

She was the first known African American suffragist. An illiterate, itinerant preacher and reformer from New York, she was an emancipated slave who supported herself with menial jobs. She traveled throughout the eastern United States and attended woman’s rights conventions as an outspoken proponent for women’s rights and women’s suffrage. Her overwhelming presence, personal magnetism and unique oratorical style captivated audiences and won even skeptics to the cause. Her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech at the Ohio Woman’s Convention in 1851 secured her reputation as a famous champion of women’s rights causes, eventually leading her to be received by President Lincoln himself at the White House in 1864.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary A veteran suffragist from Washington, D. C., Cary worked as a journalist, teacher, lawyer and politician. She was perhaps the first African American suffragist to form a suffrage Association.

During the 1850s, she was a leader and spokesperson among the African American refugees who fled to Canada after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850.

In 1853, she founded the Provincial Freeman, a newspaper dedicated to the interests of Blacks in Canada. She was acclaimed as “the first colored woman on the American continent to establish and edit a weekly newspaper.”

She called for an amendment to strike the word “male” from the Constitution. In 1871, Cary unsuccessfully tried to vote in D.C., but she and 63 other women

prevailed upon officials to sign affidavits attesting that women had tried to vote. In 1876, Cary wrote the National Woman Suffrage Association on behalf of 94 Black women requesting that their names be enrolled in the July 4th autograph book as signers of the Woman’s Declaration of Sentiments, which demanded the immediate enfranchisement of American women.

Frances E.W. Harper Harper was a Philadelphia lecturer and organizer of African American women. In 1854, she delivered a successful antislavery lecture in New Bedford, Mass., “Education and the Elevation of the Colored Race,” that launched her career. She was a founding member of the American Woman Suffrage Association, and in 1873, after returning from a tour of freedman’s communities in the reconstructed states of the South, she delivered the closing speech at the AWSA convention in New York. She called for equal rights and equal access to education for Black women, clearly defining race as a factor in the denial of women’s rights, and was an organizer of the National Association of Colored Women and became its vice president.

Maria Stewart The very first known woman to speak in public about politics to a mixed audience of men, women, whites and Blacks. Stewart was an African American woman who had a short career as a public speaker in Boston. She was a teacher, journalist, lecturer, abolitionist and women’s rights activist. She was also the first African American woman to make public lectures about women’s rights and make a public anti-slavery speech. Her speeches and lecture style are said to have heavily influenced famed orator Sojourner Truth.

MEMPHIS L AW | FALL 2020

23

The fact that voting rights were given to Black men but not to women seemed to enrage many suffragists, including Susan B. Anthony.

“I will cut off this right arm of mine before I ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman,” Anthony said at the time.

The divisive attitudes of Anthony and some fellow white women suffragists were echoed in a way by white men in power at the time who feared any push for a law that would give not only white women, but Black women, a place at the polls.

This meant a new reality for many suffragists on both sides.

Susan B. Anthony

“They realized that there really wasn’t as much common ground between African American suffragists and white, middle-class suffragists as there might have been in a society that wasn’t so polarized in questions of race,” wrote Susan Ware in her book Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote.

“There came a time that the motivation for the involvement for African Americans was broader because they were just coming out of the postslavery environment,” said Hon. Bernice B. Donald, a judge in the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and one of the most prominent African American female trailblazers of our time. “They were working and fighting for their entire communities and trying to get racial dignity and stem terroristic measures, all the while hoping for a partnership with the white suffrage movement. But with the rise of white supremacy in the South and the need to broaden the southern coalition for suffragists, African American women realized the coalition and partnership was frayed and fractured.”

Rather than join African American women in fighting for universal suffrage (the goal that the entire movement had supported prior to the Civil War), many white suffragists urged support for a federal amendment without regard for how it might pertain to Black women. By the 1910s, a great deal of white suffragists came to believe that focusing on white women getting the right to vote was the only way they could get the 19th Amendment through Congress.

In her 1917 book Woman Suffrage by Federal Constitutional Amendment, NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt openly acknowledged that Black women in the South would likely be disenfranchised in precisely the same ways that Black men had been because the federal amendment “will be subject to whatever restrictions may be imposed by state constitutions.” She noted that, in Southern states on the whole, white women outnumbered Black women, thus, “If the South really wants white supremacy, it will urge the enfranchisement of women.”

NEW ORGANIZATIONS AND POWERFUL WOMEN Despite apparent progress made by the 15th Amendment, Jim Crow laws in the South negated and undermined the new rights won by Black men.

Those laws meant that they were ordered to use separate drinking fountains, swear on separate Bibles in court, sit in segregated seats on buses and in separate areas in restaurants, among other things. States enacted literacy tests and exorbitant poll taxes which prevented many Black men from even casting their ballots.

Black women knew that they were not only fighting for the improvement of their own conditions, but those of their entire race and community.

This meant that some still viewed themselves as allies with white women

24

UNIVERSIT Y OF MEMPHIS

suffragists organizations, as they knew that having a vote would ultimately empower them against discrimination, even if it meant working alongside suffragists that at times espoused racist views.

It was around this time that new groups formed on both sides.

The split in the suffrage movement over the 15th Amendment prompted Stanton and Anthony to break ties with the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), which was formed by former abolitionists and women’s rights advocates that endorsed both women’s and Black men’s right to vote, and form the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA).

Their new organization promoted universal suffrage, insisting that Black men should not receive the vote before white women.

It was because of views such as that, as well as the racist stances taken by those like Stanton and Anthony, a good deal of disillusionment

and anger was expressed by longtime allies such as Frederick Douglass and notably, Frances E.W. Harper, the famous poet, abolitionist and writer, who was also one of the first African American women to be published in the U.S. It even caused Harper to throw her unlikely support behind the 15th Amendment and join the new American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), which supported both Black suffrage and women’s suffrage with a state-by-state approach to securing women’s rights.

“As much as white women need the ballot, colored women need it more,” Harper said in remarks at the 1873 AWSA convention. “As many whites, including some white female suffragists, publicly denounced Black male suffrage, Black women incorporated Black male suffrage as an important component of their suffrage goals.”

Harper went on to inspire many through her prose and poetry, elevating issues of racism, feminism and class.

AN INCOMPLETE VICTORY American suffragist Angelina Grimke Weld once optimistically asserted that “injustices will end between the sexes when woman gains the ballot.” But, sadly, the struggle continued for African Americans, particularly Black women.

After over 40 years of contentious debate and constant effort on the part of suffragists, Congress approved the 19th Amendment in 1919. A year later, enough states had still not voted for ratification of the law, however.

By the summer of 1920, 35 of the 48 states at the time had voted for ratification, but eight states had rejected it. Another three had refused to even weigh in.

It all came down to two remaining states: North Carolina and Tennessee. Only one of them needed to vote in favor of suffrage in order to make it the law of the land.

Tennessee was that state, becoming the essential 36th state needed to ratify the 19th Amendment.

But that may not have happened without yet another often-overlooked African American woman.

“The ballot in the hands of woman means power added to influence,” she said at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. “How well she will use that power I cannot foretell.”

Still, African American women persevered in a struggle that was seemingly separate from the white suffragist cause, and yet in some ways the same. Many became members of both women's suffrage groups — the NWSA and the AWSA — in order to keep their causes active and elevated amongst their allies.

In the latter years of the 1890s and into the early 1900s, many of these Black women began to form their own local and regional women's suffrage clubs in their regional communities.

A notable example was the DuBois Club — an African American women’s club founded by Margaret Hawkins, Augusta Chissell and Estelle Young in Baltimore in 1907 — which brought together women of color in support of change. The group started as an effort to focus

Juno Frankie Pierce was one of several leaders involved in the Volunteer State’s ratification of the Amendment.

In an unlikely and surprising instance of cooperation, especially in the Jim Crow South, Black women’s clubs in Tennessee often worked with white women’s clubs on various social issues. These connections helped foster an alliance in Nashville on suffrage as the debate around ratification was looming.

The chair of the Tennessee Equal Suffrage League, a white woman named Catherine Kenny, was impressed with Frankie Pierce throughout their campaign to get out the vote in the 1919 elections and invited her to speak at the inaugural meeting of the newly formed League of Women Voters of Tennessee in May 1920.

According to Elaine Weiss, author of the suffrage movement book “The Woman’s Hour,” Pierce’s address (as a Black woman) to several hundred white women in the Tennessee Capitol was a “taboo-breaking experiment in political cooperation.”

In her address, Pierce asked, "What will the Negro woman do with the vote? We will stand by the white women. We are optimistic because we have faith in the best white women of the country, of Nashville. We are going to make you

proud of us, because we are going to help you help us and yourselves." She continued, "We are interested in the same moral uplift of the community in which we live as you are ... We are asking only one thing — a square deal."

Sadly, even though the amendment’s passage in Tennessee was due in part to the work of Tennessee suffragists like Frankie Pierce and the rare offer of cooperation with white women suffragists in the state, African American women were left behind in the wake of “success.”

Weiss believes that the white suffragists in Tennessee did not repay Black women in the South and “did not do enough to make sure that the Black women in the South wouldn’t be robbed of the vote, and they were.”

The reality was, though women finally secured the right to vote nationwide, Black women would be regularly turned away from the ballot box until the passage of the Voting Rights Act several decades later. The act outlawed tools of disenfranchisement that targeted African Americans, such as literacy tests and poll taxes, and the dream of African American suffragists would finally come to fruition.

MEMPHIS L AW | FALL 2020

25

on literature, the arts and famous African Americans, but soon began to participate in political activities and address the suffrage issue. They slowly built up their reputation and influence among the community by establishing social groups and working with churches to lead efforts of change and reform.

Before too long, Young started a dedicated suffrage organization called the Progressive Women’s Suffrage Club, with Hawkins assuming the role of vice president and Chissell that of secretary.

They joined a nationwide collaboration of Black women, with many of them organizing under the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), which was the largest federation of Black women’s clubs in the country.

D.C., to teach and soon became the first Black woman to earn a position on the board of education there.

Terrell quickly became a leader in the Black community’s social and civic life in D.C. and soon became a member of the NAWSA, becoming the president of the new NACW group soon after its merger.

She was instrumental in building

quotes in both the Black and white media from East to West Coasts on the topics of “the race problem” and the suffrage movement.

class white leaders. It was their view that if suffrage was to be won, Black women could not be vocal supporters or the focus of the issues.

Terrell, in her recorded speeches in the NAWSA archives, told white women that “to exclude Black women from voting because of race was like excluding white women because of gender.” And in speeches to suffrage organizations,

Many Black women refused to step aside or be silenced, however.

One of them was Ida B. Wells, and she was louder and more outspoken than most.

Mary Church Terrell

Sally Wagner, editor of The Women’s Suffrage Movement anthology, called this collective effort amongst Black women’s suffrage clubs “both brilliant and politically savvy.”

Following the organization’s motto of “Lifting as We Climb” as its guiding principle, the group provided Black women a national platform to advocate for women’s suffrage and women’s rights causes, and elected Memphian Mary Church Terrell as its first president in 1912.

Terrell was one of the prime figures among Black women suffragists and clubwomen of the 20th century.

A writer, educator, suffragist and civil rights activist, she was the daughter of Memphis' own Robert Church, the South’s first Black millionaire. She was one of the first African American women to earn a college degree, obtaining both her undergraduate and master’s degree from Oberlin College. After college, she moved to Washington,

26

UNIVERSIT Y OF MEMPHIS

a national, cohesive movement out of the Black women’s clubs for reform in the Black community, and greatly enhanced the impact and formidable political significance of these Black women’s clubs themselves.

She traveled nationwide, with published articles and notable

she repeatedly defended against the charges of corruption among Black men, reminding white women of the racial barriers that kept many former slaves powerless.

But speeches and rhetoric were not going to be enough to ensure the successful cooperation of the suffrage movement’s upper-middle-

Another important figure with ties to Memphis and the Mid-South, Wells was a journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist and civil rights leader. She was an African American woman born into slavery in Holly Springs, Miss., who went on to attend Rust College and eventually moved to Memphis, where she worked as a teacher and began her journalism career. She started off her crusade for equality and justice with the filing of a lawsuit against a train car company in Memphis for unfair treatment.

She had been thrown off a firstclass train, despite having a ticket.

Although she won the case on the local level, the ruling was eventually overturned in federal court. After the lynching of one of her friends, Wells turned her attention to white mob violence. She became skeptical about the reasons Black men were lynched and set out to investigate several cases, publishing her findings in a pamphlet and wrote several columns in local newspapers. Her exposé about an 1892 lynching enraged locals, who burned her press and drove her from Memphis. After a few months, the threats became so bad she was forced to move, eventually ending up in Chicago.

Her dedication to the cause brought about one of the more memorable visuals of the movement in 1913 at the National Woman’s Party suffrage parade, the first major national event held for the suffrage

MAKING USE

OF THE PAST

FOR A BETTER FUTURE

Understanding the racial and socioeconomic class dynamics surrounding the ratification of the 19th Amendment, and this historic anniversary of it, does not lessen the significance of the amendment itself or the activism, on both sides, that led to its ratification.

Frankie Juno Pierce movement, in Washington, D.C., on the eve of President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. Wells, who founded the Alpha Suffrage Club for African American Women in Chicago (the first such club for Black women in Illinois), wrote letters to NWP founder Alice Paul asking how her club members and fellow Black women could march and participate. Paul eventually agreed to accommodate them but, acquiescing to the white racism typified in the movement and to assuage the feelings of Southern white women in the movement, told them Black suffragists would have to march at the rear of the parade rather than with the white Chicago delegation in the parade.

Wells refused the terms and as the all-white Chicago delegation passed, she emerged from the crowd and entered the front of the line among the white Chicago women and proceeded to march alongside them and their delegation.

“Either I go with you or not at all,” said Wells. “I am not taking this stand because I personally wish for the recognition. I am doing it for the future benefit of my whole race.”

She went on to co-found the National Association of Colored Women and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

But the occasion does give us the opportunity to rethink our history and learn lessons from it for our future. Fully realizing gender equality, voter fairness and racial justice all happen by understanding the past, while also giving credit to the often-forgotten heroes who helped win it.

In her book, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, Martha Jones states that “African American women are the first — and continue to be the most committed — thinkers and activists toward a human rights vision; toward a vision of women’s rights and its interest in all humans.”

“They have always rejected racism and sexism and set a high bar that has been difficult for us as a nation to reach,” she concludes.

The hard work done by Black women suffragists left a mark that is still felt in politics today, with higher percentages of eligible Black women voters casting ballots in election after election and more and more African American women working toward change on a nationally elected level.

The often-forgotten mobilization efforts and dedication of Black women, including the suffragists noted here, was vital to the success of everything from bodily autonomy to fair housing to the right to vote. These Black women organized and stood alongside white women and Black men to obtain freedoms that for too long had been denied them and taken for granted by those in power.

Their legacy today is reflected by Black women continuing to organize to support education, promote civic involvement and push back against racism. They continue to work to assure the right to vote continues to be upheld in the face of closing polling stations, gerrymandering, long wait times at polling booths and voter registration purging.

“I think that we still have a problem in this country of not being able to look at our total history,” said Judge Bernice Donald. “And I think it’s that kind of thing that caused the contributions of these African American women to be ignored, where we don’t really talk about it.”

“I think to the extent that you can deny a race its positive history, it promotes a larger frame of ignorance,” she notes. “Until we become so liberated that we can look at our total history — the good, the bad and the ugly — we will continue to have problems and continue to promote an agenda that overlooks the contributions of all.”

Black women, such as the oftenoverlooked heroes we’ve noted in this article, have always been a powerful force in America.

As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, it is a timely moment to reflect on all they’ve done while never giving up in the face of adversity.

MEMPHIS L AW | FALL 2020

27

Honorable Bernice B. Donald U N I T E D S TAT E S C O U R T O F A P P E A L S F O R T H E S I X T H C I R C U I T

A B a r r i e r - B r e a k i n g Wo m a n R e f l e c t s o n Our Current Situation and the Road Ahead

By Ryan Jones | Photography by Ziggy Mack

UDGE BERNICE BOUIE DONALD HAS SPENT HER entire life breaking down barriers and being the “first” to achieve a great many things.

The term “trailblazer” does not really begin to sum up her self-forged path.

As a child, she was among the first four African American students to integrate Olive Branch, Miss. schools. Not too long after graduating from the University of Memphis School of Law, where she was a first-generation college student, she was elected to the criminal division of Shelby County General Sessions Court, making her the first female African American judge in Tennessee history. In 1988, Donald was appointed as a judge for the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Western District

28

UNIVERSIT Y OF MEMPHIS

of Tennessee, making her the first female African American bankruptcy judge in the nation. Breaking down yet another barrier, she was nominated by President Bill Clinton to serve as the first African American female U.S. District Judge in the Western District of Tennessee, where she remained until her present appointment in 2010. The trend continued with that appointment as well, with President Barack Obama nominating her in December 2010 to serve as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, once again making her the first African American female to sit on that court.

Her lifelong tendency of being a “first” extends off the bench as well. She was the first African American and the first female to serve as president of the American Bar Foundation, the nation’s leading research institute for the empirical study of the law,

and formally served as the secretary of the American Bar Association, once again as the first African American woman to do so.

A common theme amongst her decisions to steadily break down barriers and advance toward more influential and powerful positions throughout her career is a surprising one, though it won’t be to anyone that knows her well. In conversations, Donald often comes back to her desire to ensure those in power do not abuse it and to use her own position to help those in need.

“I wanted to be in a position of power so I could ensure that others are treated with respect by those in power,” she said in a past interview with one of her former law clerks, Samara Spence. “I saw too often how people, including myself, were not always treated with respect, and it was simply unacceptable.”

Alumni Spotlight

MEMPHIS L AW | FALL 2020

29

XPANDING UPON THAT vision, she notes that her views on equality and interest in helping lift others up started when she was just a child.

“I remember being in school and reading those lofty words in our founding documents extolling equality,” she said. “But looking at my circumstances, it didn’t seem to apply. As a child, I could not reconcile the language of equality on the books, with the lived experiences of my parents and siblings. So, I grew up wanting to do everything I could to attain that.”

Even her childhood ideas about her career path seemed to echo this sentiment of helping others. As a young girl, long before any aspirations of being an attorney or judge came into play, she would gather her dolls and those of her sisters and line them all up, where she would then “teach” those assembled “students” by reading to them from encyclopedias. This idea of being a teacher stuck with her as she got older, and though her mother eventually persuaded her to go to college and reconsider being a full-time teacher, Donald has maintained a presence in the classroom throughout her judicial career, serving as an adjunct professor at various institutions over the years, including the University of Memphis School of Law. On a national teaching level, Donald served as president of the National Association of Women Judges in the early 90's, where she developed a curriculum to teach women how to position themselves

30

UNIVERSIT Y OF MEMPHIS

for election in states or how to develop as lawyers to be qualified candidates for appointment to judgeships.

She even notes that after her time on the bench is done, teaching is something she would love to take on full-time.

“I’ve always had this desire to teach,” she notes. “The exchange with people from all backgrounds is just so important. Our lived experiences and our understanding of others’ experiences really play a critical role in what kind of community, and nation, we become.”

“I can walk into a classroom and be beyond exhausted, but when I come out, I feel like I could float,” she expounded.

“It’s just the ideas that invigorate me.

I feel like the students today motivate me and we all teach each other.”

But, like everyone else, Donald’s life and career have been affected by the recent COVID-19 pandemic. From her externs operating remotely, to court appearances and oral arguments happening via Zoom, to the future definition of accepted electronic signatures, she has seen an incredible amount of change in the last few months as a result of the COVID-19 measures put in place.

“I believe a lot of the changes brought about by the recent COVID-19 pandemic can be a benefit to access to justice,” Donald noted. “It is very expensive for people to participate in many aspects of the legal system. For example, prior to the pandemic, if a person had a case set for oral argument at the Sixth Circuit to argue the case in Cincinnati, people had

to fund their lawyer’s travel and accommodations to come and argue the case in person. Since we have been hearing oral arguments post-pandemic via Zoom, everybody can just argue from where they are, which drastically reduces the cost of participation.”

As a past delegate to the ABA, she also has an extremely informed take on not only the legal profession, but also legal education itself. She notes how important the emphasis on diversity

have partnered on as just the sort of program that the ABA encourages. For the past 10 years, SLIP has sought to develop and nurture an interest in the legal profession among young people from underrepresented groups throughout the city. These students are placed in law firms, corporate legal departments, or government agencies throughout the Mid-South and are required to work a total of 60 hours during the four-week program.

I wanted to be in a position of power so I could ensure that others are treated with respect by those in power. in law school, and in the legal field itself, is to the future of the industry. With or without the changes brought about by the current pandemic, she believes diversity, mentoring, pipeline programs and increased exposure to diverse experiences are all vitally important to the future of the law, as well as to our communities.

“We as lawyers have to address our huge pipeline issue, in communities both large and small,” Donald noted. “We have to have greater mentorship programs and starting not just when students are in law school, because that is too late, but starting when people are in high school or even earlier.”

She points out the successful Summer Legal Internship Program (SLIP) that the University of Memphis and the Memphis Bar Association

“We have to let these young, underrepresented people know to start thinking about the legal profession early,” said Donald. “To start exposing them to these experiences, and to really get them thinking about the possibilities, is a great thing.”

She quotes her aunt on the topic of why teaching and mentoring others once you have success is vitally important.

“My aunt used to say, ‘You can’t live any better than you know, but when you know better, you’re supposed to do better.’”

The importance of today’s attorneys advocating for policy changes that positively affect change at the community and neighborhood levels is something that Donald strongly believes in. She noted that

we need to see more and more of this sort of thing in order to change the way young students see the legal profession. And in the long term, it will help the legal profession become more diverse.

“We now know that the experiences that young children have with reading and exposure to positive role models and influences can have a great effect on where people set their sights,” said Donald. “And for attorneys and legislators who have influence over policy choices that deal with children’s health, nutrition and schools, it’s these sorts of people that can really help create an environment very early on that can allow a child to enlarge their universe of opportunities.

An important detail to the future of diversity, according to Donald, is the duty of current attorneys to say that no part of the profession is off-limits to diverse students. “We have to encourage diverse students to pursue careers in prosecution as well as defense, in intellectual property as well as employment law,” she said.

“We have to talk to people about not only being judges, but also opening their own law firms. Many of these young people are from communities where they have no interaction with lawyers, or if they do it’s because of a crisis. They need to see what is possible and expose them to the legal community early and related experiences.”

It’s clear from speaking with her that the future of the legal profession and legal education is tied to both fields embracing diversity, no matter what the current pandemic may bring in terms of changes.

One thing is for certain though, Judge Donald will be at the forefront of whatever the future brings, likely as the first one to embrace the change.

MEMPHIS L AW | FALL 2020

31

Alumni Notes ’87

Thomas J. Cullen of Goodell DeVries has become a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers.

Lawrence “Larry” Mansfield is currently serving as vice president of the Pennsylvania Bar Foundation as well as the immediate past president of the Mansfield University Foundation.

’77

Hill

Charlie Hill was honored by Power Players 2020 and Inside Memphis Business magazine as a “Power Player in Employment Law.” Additionally, Hill recently made history as part of the first team of attorneys to present oral arguments to the Tennessee Supreme Court by videoconferencing.

’93

Dorothy Sanders Wells has had several recent articles published. In the Christian Century, she published “The Coronavirus Pandemic’s Unequal Burden on African Americans: A Plague Is Being Visited On All Of Us, But Not Evenly” and “Ahmaud Arbery’s Lynching Begs America To Respond: What Would It Take To Stop Seeing Neighbors As Intruders And Threats?”

She also published the article “Founding ‘Truths’ Still Not Evident To All,” in The Commercial Appeal.

Additionally, she was recently the featured preacher at the Ogilvie Institute of Preaching/Fuller Seminary.

’79

Pauline Weaver has been elected secretary of the American Bar Association. ’80

Judge Tim Dwyer was honored as a “Champion of Justice” by the Memphis Bar Association’s Access to Justice Committee at the 2019 Pro Bono Awards Luncheon. This honor was bestowed in recognition of his commitment to helping others and the pursuit of justice for all while serving our community through the Drug Court.

Dwyer

’94

Rebecca J. Colson opened her own law firm, Colson Family Law, P.A., in Fernandina Beach, Fla., in early 2020. Additionally, she recently obtained Florida Supreme Court Certification in Family Law Mediation.

The Hon. Diane Vescovo, Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge, Western District of Tennessee, was honored as the 31st recipient of the Marion Griffin-Frances Loring Award for outstanding achievement in the legal profession by the AWA.

’97

’85

Pickler

David A. Pickler won the Invest in Others Catalyst Award.

David earned the national honor for his charitable work with his foundation, the American Public Education Foundation. The Catalyst Award is presented annually to a financial advisor who has been an active stimulus for positive change and displayed entrepreneurial vision and leadership to a nonprofit organization for at least three years. Additionally, he was named to Forbes’ Best-In-State Wealth Advisor list for 2020.

Carraway

Shelly D. Thornton has been promoted to Global Supply Chain Operating Unit Manager for Northrop Grumman Corp., where she is responsible for management of global supply chain personnel in Huntsville, Ala., and Colorado Springs, Colo. ’98

’86

Chumney

Carol Chumney recently presented at the panel discussion held by the Columbia Law chapter of the American Constitution Society at the event “Election Security and the Paperless Ballot: Litigation and Advocacy for a Stronger Democracy.”

Koratsky

UNIVERSIT Y OF MEMPHIS

Kim Koratsky was recently appointed as the Municipal Court judge for the City of Lakeland, Tenn. Prior to his appointment with Lakeland, Koratsky served as the deputy county attorney for Shelby County and was a partner with the law firm of Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs. ’99

Michael L. Russell of Russell Dispute Resolutions PLLC was recently elected as a Fellow of the College of Labor and Employment.

Russell

32

Kirk Carraway, of the law firm of Allen, Summers, Simpson, Lillie & Gresham, PLLC, has been named a Superlawyer in the field of Labor & Employment

by Law & Politics. Additionally, he was selected

by Avvo as a Top Rated Lawyer for 2020.

’04

Greg Pease, a member at Sherrard Roe Voigt & Harbison, has been reappointed associate general counsel of the Tennessee Bar Association’s Board of Governors. This is his third term in this position. In this role, Pease advises the board on corporate matters and serves under the general counsel, Ed Lanquist. ’05

Greer

Thomas R. Greer, partner at Bailey & Greer, PLLC, has been named Outstanding Trial Lawyer of the Year by the Tennessee Trial Lawyers Association. This annual award goes to an attorney for being an “advocate of a noble cause, and who demonstrated superior skills and achieved an outstanding result for a client against great obstacles.”

Justin K. Thomas recently formed and is a partner/ attorney at the law firm of Thomas, White & Gill PLLC. ’08

Sherrod

Elizabeth Dodd Sherrod was recently named as one of Knoxville’s “40 Under 40” by the Knoxville Business Journal. She works for the University of Tennessee Medical Center, where she helps guide their legal protocols as assistant general counsel. ’09

Lisa J. Gill recently has been named a partner/attorney at the law firm of Thomas, White & Gill PLLC. Judge Mary Wagner received the 2019 Chancellor Charles A. Rond Memorial Award for Outstanding Judge of the Year from the Memphis Bar Association Young Lawyers’ Division. ’10

Sisco-Beck

LaKeisha Sisco-Beck has been promoted to senior associate counsel at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital where she specializes in healthcare law, enterprise risk management and providing legal support to clinical operations. She also recently earned the American Institute of Healthcare Compliance’s Officer of Healthcare Compliance, Certified designation.

’15

Ariel Anthony, of the law firm of Husch Blackwell, was recently named to the National Black Lawyers Top 40 Under 40 Black Lawyers in Tennessee list.

Anthony

William J. Hardegree has joined the Agentis law firm as a partner in the Litigation Practice Group in its new Tennessee offices. ’16

Alexander B. Roberson accepted an offer to work as the school administration consultant for charter schools at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. Alex leaves the Shelby County Schools Office of Charter Schools, where his work lead to SCS successfully defending nearly a dozen local school board charter portfolio decisions in appeal hearings before the Tennessee State Board of Education.

Jason Susser, Associate Attorney at Siskind Susser, P.C., was recently a featured speaker at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Bechtel International Center where he spoke about immigration and entrepreneurship. ’17

Stephanie Berish recently celebrated her first anniversary working for Advocates for Immigrant Rights as a staff attorney.

Taylor Oyaas recently joined the law firm of Thomas, White & Gill PLLC. ’19

Johnathan Tyler Hutton recently graduated from Northwestern Prtizker School of Law with an LLM in Taxation and began work as an international tax associate at PwC in New York City.

’14

Megan Lane, attorney with Harris Shelton Hanover Walsh, has been named as the 2020 AWA president.

Jenna McDonald Nichols recently joined the law firm of Thomas, White & Gill PLLC. Lee Whitwell recently briefed and argued a case (Moss v. Shelby Cty. Civil Serv. Merit Bd.) to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which he won in March.

MEMPHIS L AW | FALL 2020

33

FACU LT Y

Accomplishments Alena Allen Professor Allen was appointed director of faculty research at the law school for the 2020-21 academic year. She also was elected to a two-year term to represent the law school in the University Faculty Senate.

Additionally, she chaired the Merit Selection Panel for the bankruptcy vacancy created by the retirements of Judge Delk and Judge Emerson. She also was appointed to serve as a judge for the 2020 H. Thomas Austern Writing Competition sponsored by the Food and Drug Law Institute.

Allen also had several items recently accepted for publication. A book chapter on Tort Liability and Fairness, “Integrating Doctrine and Diversity: Inclusion & Equity in the Law School Classroom” is forthcoming, as is an additional book chapter on Robinson v. Cutchin, “Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tort Opinions.”

Donna Harkness Professor Harkness was appointed to serve as Memphis Law’s liaison to the Memphis Bar Association, where she will also serve as a member of both the MBA Access to Justice and Professionalism committees.

DeShun Harris Professor Harris began her term as president of the Academic Support Educators, which includes academic and bar support experts from around the nation. Additionally, Harris was the recent recipient of the 2020 Farris Bobango PLC Faculty Scholarship Award.

Finally, Allen presented a work-in-progress, “The Emotional Woman,” at Tulane Law School’s Murphy Institute.

Lynda Black Professor Black served as a contributing writer for the multi-volume Feminist Judgments Project, where she also authored a chapter dealing with the intersection of reproductive and inheritance rights for the Trusts & Estates volume. Additionally, she was recently selected as the 1A Faculty Athletics Representative from the American Athletic Conference. Also, she was appointed to a second term as the chair of the Intra-Conference Transfer Waiver Committee for the American Athletic Conference. Finally, she began her term of service on the Ethics Committee advising the Biorepository and Integrative Genomics (BIG) Initiative for Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital.

Regina Hillman Professor Hillman participated as a panelist and moderated a panel in the Tennessee Bar Association’s LGBT Annual Forum in June. The day’s entire program was devoted to the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision. Additionally, the event featured the reunion of the entire legal team that argued the case and saw them take part in the program to discuss and give insight into the case, preparations and the proceedings. Hillman was a part of the legal team that argued this case before the U.S. Supreme Court originally.

Black also received the Patricia & Dan Murrell Ethics & Professionalism in Teaching Award in 2020.

Demetria Frank Professor Frank was the recent recipient of the 2020 MLK50 Faculty Service Award.

34

UNIVERSIT Y OF MEMPHIS

D.R. Jones Professor Jones was a lead commenter and participant at the Privacy Law Scholars’ Conference held virtually in June. This is an invitation-only conference. At this conference she served as the lead commenter on the paper “The Underappreciated Role of Avoidability in Privacy Law.”

Daniel Kiel Professor Kiel was appointed associate director of the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change. He was also named the FedEx Professor of Law at the law school.

Additionally, he was named as a finalist for Memphis Business Journal’s “Best of the Bar” in the category of public service.

Ernie Lidge After more than three decades of distinguished service to the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law, Professor Ernie Lidge announced his retirement at the end of the 2019-20 academic year. Lidge joined the law school in 1988 after years of successful practice at Mayer, Brown & Platt in Chicago. In joining the law school community, Lidge returned to his true passion as an educator, having taught Social Studies at Glenbrook North High School in Glenbrook, Ill., before pursuing a law degree. Since that time, he has taught labor/employment law and legal ethics to thousands of University of Memphis law students who have come to appreciate his commitment to teaching excellence.

Andrew McClurg After 34 years of teaching, Professor Andrew McClurg announced that he will be retiring at the end of the fall 2020 semester. McClurg has served as professor and Herbert Herff Chair of Excellence at Memphis Law for the past 14 years, where he built upon his already well-established reputation as a nationally recognized teacher and scholar who has published books and articles in the areas of legal education, privacy law, firearms law and policy, comparative law, wrongful death, logic and rhetoric, elder financial exploitation, health law and products liability.

David Romantz In 2020, Professor David Romantz was named the Unity in Diversity Professor of the Year at the Third Annual Unity in Diversity Scholarship Banquet. The award recognizes his countless contributions to diversity and inclusion at the law school. Romantz also published the third edition of his popular book Legal Analysis: The Fundamental Skill (with K. Vinson, Carolina Academic Press, 2020). Since its initial publication in 1998, the book has been adopted at dozens of law schools across the country.

Daniel Schaffzin Following a one-year term as the co-president of the Clinical Legal Education Association, Professor Schaffzin is now serving as CLEA’s immediate past president. With more than 1,300 members, CLEA is the largest independent organization of law professors in the country.

Schaffzin also serves as the co-chair of CLEA’s New Clinicians Committee. In this role, he led the planning of the 2020 CLEA New Clinicians Conference, an online event that drew nearly 300 attendees on June 15-18. Schaffzin served as senior faculty for the fourth annual Strategic Code Enforcement Management Academy hosted by the University of Memphis School of Law in June. This year’s academy was presented online and included participating teams from Cincinnati, Covington, Tenn., Little Rock, Memphis, Rockford, Ill., St. Louis, and Worcester, Mass. In May 2020, Professor Schaffzin completed a two-year term as the president of Beth Sholom Synagogue.

Jodi Wilson Professor Wilson recently completed her term as the immediate past president of the Association of Legal Writing Directors. She served in that position after serving as president-elect in 2018-19 and president in 2019-20. Additionally, she has a forthcoming piece as a coauthor in Volume 89 of the UMKC Law Review: “Law Students and Cell Phone Use: Results of a Six-School Survey.” She also has a forthcoming piece for publication in Memphis Lawyer Magazine: “Covid-19 Brings Renewed Attention to Supervised Practice Pending Admission.”

MEMPHIS L AW | FALL 2020

35

Faculty Opinion/Editorial

Lawyers Need Cultural Competence

by Professor Demetria Frank

The benefits of a diverse population put the United States at a great advantage to the rest of the world in many areas. However, we seldom address the difficulties that this diversity brings and the cultural misunderstandings and manifestations of bias that are likely to occur. Given the painful history of how diverse populations have been treated in the United States, and the deficits created in every important area of life as a result, cultural misunderstandings and biases present significant problems in communication-based professions like lawyering. Unlike the medical and social work professions that have made cultural competence a cornerstone of professional education for a number of years, however, the legal profession has been much slower to recognize the importance of this skillset in legal education and the delivery of lawyer services.

Lawyer cultural competence can be understood as a set of behaviors, attitudes and policies that that enable a lawyer to work effectively in cross-cultural situations, especially in diverse systems, agencies and with other professionals.

Though not technically a requirement under most states’ rules of conduct, professional rules on basic competence arguably compel culturally sensitive lawyering. For instance, Tennessee’s Rule of Professional Responsibility Rule 1.1 explains that “Competent representation requires the legal knowledge, skill, thoroughness and preparation reasonably necessary for the representation.” In many instances, the knowledge, skill, thoroughness and preparation referred to in Rule 1.1 requires an understanding of cultural dynamics at play.

Culture shapes human behavior and understanding in countless ways that are relevant to the practice of law.

For example, child discipline can significantly vary by culture. While some families practice discipline by separating the child from the environment or situation causing misbehavior, in others, spanking is customary.

For family lawyers representing families in child custody cases, the lawyer must understand the family’s disciplinary approach to explain that the parent’s actions are in the “best interest of the child,” which is central to child custody arrangements. Cultural competence is also necessary in many other areas, including having an understanding of norms and

36

UNIVERSIT Y OF MEMPHIS

beliefs on “snitching” in criminal cases, whether clients view themselves as independent decision-makers and client spiritual reliance in decision making.

Cultural competence is also important to the manner in which lawyers deliver legal services. Research suggests that implicit biases impact all individuals and attorney biases likely result in less favorable outcomes for racially and ethnically diverse clients. When lawyers and clients come from different backgrounds and cultural viewpoints, they are more likely to have a difficult time building trusting relationships, which can impede the sharing of honest and accurate information necessary for competent representation. When lawyers do not appreciate cultural influences, they risk misunderstanding objectives of the lawyer-client relationship or misrepresenting their client’s perspective. When lawyers are unaware of how culture influences their clients' beliefs, behaviors, or values; they risk substituting their own judgment at critical points of the representation, such as during settlement negotiations. Even worse, lawyers who do not possess cultural competence skills risk alienating clients from the legal system altogether.

The need for cultural competence is also critical to interpersonal working relationships in legal organizations. Although achieving diversity goals still proves to be a challenge for legal environments, with only minimal improvements over the last two decades, legal employers can no longer afford to merely strive for a more diverse workplace. The American Bar Association regularly concedes that diverse attorneys are underrepresented in every area of the legal profession relative to the percentage of the general population. Equally important to acknowledge, however, is that women and individuals from minority groups report less job satisfaction in traditional legal environments and are more likely to leave the profession.

Without substantial gains in the number of diverse attorneys, the profession is unlikely to overcome these trends. In legal environments that truly value cultural competence, women and diverse lawyers have a better ability to build satisfactory relationships among colleagues, gain professional mentors, make meaningful contributions, hold leadership positions and are more likely to remain in the profession.

Moreover, among collegial relationships in legal environments, the lack of cross-cultural competence can obstruct the collaborative and inclusive environment necessary for effective representation in a competitive global legal market. As noted by the U.S. Supreme Court in Grutter v. Bollinger, “Major American businesses have made clear that the skills needed in today’s increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas and viewpoints.” Leaders of legal organizations that do not possess cultural competence are less likely to appreciate this reality to the detriment of clients and business markets.

Culturally competent lawyering is also important to maintaining integrity, fairness and consistency in the legal profession. When one in three Black men will be incarcerated at some point in their lifetime, it is impossible to disentangle the treatment of Black Americans in the criminal system from the broader inequities related to race and class. The COVID-19 crisis has additionally revealed profound systemic inequities that we all knew existed for minorities and low-income individuals in health care, education and business, but have yet to adequately address.

Theoretically, at least, culturally competent lawyers are more likely to promote equitable legal policies and principals and better understand the impacts and processes of modern systemic injustice.

It has been 100 years since the 19th Amendment was ratified and nearly six decades since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Nevertheless, we are just beginning the important conversation related to how individual demographics impact legal representation and professional relationships. Only recently have law schools become more intentional and institutionally responsible for promoting cultural competence in students despite the obvious and dire need for culturally competent contemporary lawyering practice.

Many still have not done so.

Given this recency and institutional reluctance, law schools need the assistance of alumni, legal employers and other community partners to reinforce cultural competence as a valuable lawyering skill. We need to take cues from the medical and social work occupations by promoting a legal profession that expects cultural competence proficiency.

Katelyn Dagen CLASS OF 2021 Externship with Judge Bernice Donald, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit See story on page 6

PERIODICAL POSTAGE 1 North Front Street Memphis, TN 38103-2189

PAID

MEMPHIS, TN