Howard University’s School of Law made a name for itself decades ago, blazing trails with graduates and professors making the legal arguments in courts across the country for civil rights for minorities.
Thurgood Marshall, the late Howard Law School alum who successfully argued major civil rights cases and eventually became a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, headlines a long, prestigious list of individuals who traced their legal roots to the Howard law school, opened in 1869, just after the U.S. Civil War.
The issues raised by Marshall, his colleagues, predecessors and successors, may have changed in name and style, yet not so much in substance, say law veterans across the nation. There is still widespread racial and economic discrimination in all aspects of society from health care to housing, from police treatment of civilians to treatment in the courts.
“We have just as many civil rights issues today as we had 50 years ago,” says Howard law school Dean Danielle Holley-Walker, the 43-year-old lawyer who was hired in 2014 to run the law school. She says that recent events, from the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore to the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri are reminders of the work to be done.
“We have a very critical mission at this time,” says Holley-Walker, referring to the uncertainty across the nation about civil rights and immigration issues. Howard law school and its peer institutions “need to produce more lawyers in civil justice reform, voting right law, immigration law and education,” she says, as she ticked off a list of issues confronting the nation.
The law school has opened The Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center to help emphasize its focus on the law school’s “brand” of law. For sure, it has expanded its portfolio overall, she says, yet everything is rooted in the law school’s century-and-a-half commitment to justice. There are symbolic reminders showered about the law school campus in Northwest Washington D.C., including busts of Marshall and his mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, a legend in Howard law school history.
Holley-Walker, who left her post as associate dean at the University of North Carolina to take on the Howard challenge, says the law school has been fortunate in the past decade or two with respect to admissions, enrollment and sustenance.
