Race, Law, and Citizenship with Prof. Kathleen Cleaver

In October of 2016, Professor Kathleen Neal Cleaver joined Michigan Law students to teach a seminar on Race, Law, and Citizenship. The seminar explored issues of rights through the lens of American legal history in the arena of citizenship, race, and democracy. The seminar begins in the 19th century with Crandall v. Connecticut, a case where a progressive state Supreme Court judgment was powerless against the anger of a local mob, and ends in the Civil Rights Movement.  

Professor Cleaver, a world-renowned legal scholar and an early founder and leader of the Black Panther Movement has not only exceptional knowledge, but also extraordinary firsthand experience in the field of civil rights. Taught in the broader context of the upcoming 2016 presidential elections, this seminar affords students timely consideration of the recurrent themes in American legal and political history. Professor Cleaver, who currently holds an appointment as a senior lecturer and research fellow at Emory University School of Law, has spent her life participating in the human rights struggle. She started alongside her parents in the 1950s civil rights protests in Alabama. By 1966, Kathleen Neal dropped out of Barnard College in New York to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) where she served in its Campus Program based in Atlanta. She was the first Communications Secretary of the Black Panther Party. Prof. Cleaver graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in History from Yale, and received her J.D. from Yale Law School. After graduating, she worked for the law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and clerked for the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia.

The course is sponsored by the Afro-American and African Studies Department, the Michigan Journal of Race & Law, the Black Law Students Association at the University of Michigan Law School, the Racial Justice Coalition at the University of Michigan Law School, the National Lawyers Guild at the University of Michigan Law School, the American Constitution Society at the University of Michigan Law School, and the American Civil Liberties Union at the University of Michigan Law School.

Videos of each of Professor Cleaver's classes can be seen by clicking on the pictures below.

Lecture 1

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Lecture 3

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