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Presented By: University of Michigan Law School

Jane Cleo Marshall Lucas Lecture Honoring African-American Women Leaders in the Law

Judge Anna Blackburne-Rigsby will deliver the inaugural lecture

Judge Anna Blackburne-Rigsby of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals will lecture on the contribution of African-American women to America's understanding of Justice. Judge Blackburne-Rigsby chairs the District of Columbia Courts’ Standing Committee on Fairness and Access, serves as Co-Chair of the District of Columbia's Access to Justice Commission, and is a former President the National Association of Women Judges (NAWJ).

Jane Cleo Marshall Lucas, the first female African-American graduate of the Law School, was born in Benton Harbor, Michigan in 1920. She received a scholarship to Howard University and was part of the class entering in 1937. She graduated from Howard University in 1941. She received her M.A. in political science from the University of Michigan Rackham School of Graduate Studies in 1942 and in the fall of 1942 began at the University of Michigan Law School. She graduated from the Law School in 1944 and passed the Michigan bar examination. After graduation, her first job was in the law office of Arthur Davis Shores, the only Black lawyer in Alabama. Because of the hurdles placed in her way, she was not able to sit for the Alabama bar examination before she married and moved to Fairmont Height, Maryland. In 1946, she became the first African-American woman to pass the Maryland bar and was invited to join the Howard University law faculty becoming the first woman to teach full-time on the law faculty. She resigned from the faculty in 1950 and moved with her husband to Staten Island, New York. She later worked for the Women's Division of the Labor Department, the Civil Rights Commission, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Washington, D.C. (Description from Rebels in Law: Voices in History of Black Women Lawyers).

This event is sponsored by The American Constitution Society and is free and open to the public.

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