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About the Event:
In the U.S., a movement for reparation for slavery, and legalized forms of racial segregation and discrimination is growing. From local government initiatives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to renewed discussions about an HR 40 Bill at the federal Congress level, redress for centuries of racialized forms of violence is on the public and official political agenda.
In this panel, scholars of redress will discuss the trajectory of the reparations movement in the U.S., as well as explore enduring barriers to reparatory justice. We will furthermore examine methods for rectifying systemic inequality that has resulted from past and ongoing forms of racial discrimination.
The Amendment Project (TAP) is a student-led organization seeking to drive young people to join the movement for reparations. Through city-council level campaigns like the one in Tulsa in 2021 and workshops hosted with organizations like the ACLU and university and high school organizations, TAP works to mobilize through student lobbying and providing educational resources on reparations in a modern context.
About the Speakers:
- Katherine M. Franke is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University, where she also directs the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law and is the founder and faculty director of the Law, Rights, and Religion Project, a think tank based at Columbia Law School that develops policy and thought leadership on the complex ways in which religious liberty rights interact with other fundamental rights. She is a member of the Executive Committee for the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality and the Center for Palestine Studies. She is among the nation’s leading scholars writing on law, race, religion, and rights.
In 2021, Professor Franke launched the ERA Project, a law and policy think tank to develop academically rigorous research, policy papers, expert guidance, and strategic leadership on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution, and on the role of the ERA in advancing the larger cause of gender-based justice. Franke is currently leading a team that is researching Columbia Law School’s relationship to slavery and its legacies.
Her most recent book, Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition (Haymarket, 2019) makes the case for racial reparations today by telling the story of experiments in South Carolina and Mississippi in the 1860s where freed people were given land explicitly as reparation for enslavement and then had it taken away by the government. Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality (NYU Press, 2015) considered the costs of winning marriage for same-sex couples today and for African Americans at the end of the Civil War. Franke was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011 to undertake research for Wedlocked. In addition to her work at the Law School, she worked regularly in Palestine until the state of Israel banned her from reentry in the spring of 2018, citing her advocacy on behalf of the human rights of Palestinians. She also chairs the board of directors of the Center for Constitutional Rights, based in New York City.
Before coming to the Law School, Franke was an associate professor of law at Fordham Law School and the University of Arizona College of Law. From 1990 to 1991, she was the executive director of the National Lawyers Guild. Prior to that, she worked for the New York City Commission on Human Rights and founded the AIDS and Employment Project.
- Justin Hansford founded the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center in Fall 2017. Professor Hansford was previously a Democracy Project Fellow at Harvard University, a visiting professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, and an associate professor of Law at Saint Louis University.
He has a B.A. from Howard University and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, where he was a founder of the Georgetown Journal of Law and Modern Critical Race Perspectives. Hansford also has received a Fulbright Scholar award to study the legal career of Nelson Mandela, and served as a clerk for Judge Damon J. Keith on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Hansford is a leading scholar and activist in the areas of critical race theory, human rights, and law and social movements. He is a co-author of the forthcoming Seventh Edition of “Race, Racism and American Law,” the celebrated legal textbook that was the first casebook published specifically for teaching race-related law courses. His interdisciplinary scholarship has appeared in academic journals at various universities, including Harvard, Georgetown, Fordham, and the University of California at Hastings.
In the wake of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Hansford worked to empower the Ferguson community through community-based legal advocacy. He co-authored the Ferguson to Geneva human rights shadow report and accompanied the Ferguson protesters and Mike Brown’s family to Geneva, Switzerland, to testify at the United Nations.
He has served as a policy advisor for proposed post-Ferguson reforms at the local, state, and federal level, testifying before the Ferguson Commission, the Missouri Advisory Committee to the United States Civil Rights Commission, the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
- Linda Mann is the co-founder of the African American Redress Network (AARN), a collaboration between Columbia University, School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), Columbia University, Institute for the Study of Human Right (ISHR), and Howard University, Thurgood Marshall Center. She currently has an appointment at SIPA. Her research and practice focus on the intersection of U.S. history, human rights, and reparations.
Mann previously served as the Executive Director for the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University’s School of Law and VP of Research for the Georgetown Memory Project, where she founded and directed the GU272 Descendant Oral History Initiative.
Mann is a seasoned educator with over ten years of postgraduate teaching experience and ten years as a public-school history educator. Mann started her career as a conflict resolution specialist and has decades of experience as a political, grassroots organizer.
- Sydni Scott CC'22 (moderator), Founder, The Amendment Project (TAP) and Holder Initiative Student Advisory Board member