Women in Law Section Virtual Book Club Meeting: She Took Justice

Please join NYSBA’s Women in Law Section for a virtual book club meeting featuring Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, Professor of Constitutional Law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY). Professor Browne-Marshall will discuss her book She Took Justice: The Black Woman, Law, and Power – 1619 to 1969. In this powerful work, readers go on a journey from the invasion of Africa into the Colonial period and the Civil Rights Movement. The book explores centuries of courage in the face of racial prejudice and gender oppression. Readers gain insight into American history through The Black Woman's fight against race laws, especially criminal injustice. She became an organizer, leader, activist, lawyer, and judge – a fighter in her own advancement. Using perseverance, tenacity, intelligence, and faith, she turned the law into a weapon to combat discrimination, a prestigious occupation, and a platform from which she could lift others as she rose. This is a book for every reader.

Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is a tenured Professor of Constitutional Law at John Jay College (CUNY). She also taught in the Africana Studies Program at Vassar College. Prior to academia, Professor Browne-Marshall clerked in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and litigated cases for the Southern Poverty Law Center, Community Legal Services, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Inc. In addition to She Took Justice, which is the basis for her documentary film Before 1619: She Took Justice, she is the author of Race, Law, and American Society: 1607 to Present, The Voting Rights War, The Constitution: Major Cases and Conflicts, and The Black Woman: 400 Years of Perseverance. She is also a playwright with seven produced plays and looks forward to the production of her play that asks "who owns American history?" She has completed work on a documentary based on travels to Angola and is working on a nonfiction book on uprisings and her debut novel.

Professor Browne-Marshall is the recipient of many awards, including an IOP Harvard Kennedy School Fellowship, Pulitzer Center grant, Wiley College Woman of Excellence Award, NAACP Service Award, Emerging Screenwriter Award, American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, an EMMY Award for writing the animated series “Your Democracy,” many film festival awards, and the Frederick Lewis Allen Fellowship. She has also appeared in several documentary films, including Let The World See on Mamie and Emmett Till, Harriet Tubman: Visions of Freedom, and Becoming Frederick Douglass. She speaks nationally and internationally about her books and issues of social justice.