Margaret Burnham | |
---|---|
Member of the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board | |
Incumbent | |
Assumed office April 5, 2022 | |
Nominated by | Joe Biden |
Preceded by | Position created |
Personal details | |
Born | Birmingham,Alabama,U.S. | December 28,1944
Relations | Louis E. Burnham (father) Linda Burnham (sister) Charles Burnham (brother) |
Education | Tougaloo College (BA) University of Pennsylvania (LLB) |
Margaret A. Burnham (born December 28,1944) [1] is an American lawyer,University Distinguished Professor of Law at the Northeastern University School of Law,founder of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project,and co-founder of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive. [2] Burnham is also the Faculty Co-Director for Northeastern Law's Center for Law,Equity and Race (CLEAR). [3] She is a Senate-confirmed nominee to be a member of the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board.
Burnham was born in Birmingham,Alabama in 1944. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Tougaloo College and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. [4]
Burnham's legal practice included serving as an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. [1]
In 1970,Burnham worked with CPUSA lawyer John Abt to defend Angela Davis,her friend since childhood,and later wrote the foreword to Abt's memoir. [5]
In 1977,she became the first female African American Judge in Massachusetts,serving as an Associate Justice of the Boston Municipal Court until 1982. [1]
In 2008,she was one of the lawyers in a landmark federal lawsuit against Franklin County,Mississippi for their law-enforcement agents' involvement in the 1964 Ku Klux Klan kidnapping,torture and killing of two 19-year-olds,Henry Dee and Charles Eddie Moore. [6]
On June 11,2021,President Joe Biden nominated Burnham to be a member of the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board. [7] The Senate's Homeland Security committee held hearings on Burnham's nomination on January 13,2022. The committee favorably reported her nomination on February 2,2022. Burnham was officially confirmed by the entire Senate via voice vote on February 17,2022. [8]
Burnham has authored and coauthored numerous articles; [9] and one book,By Hands Now Known:Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners, [10] which examines the history of racialized lethal violence during the Jim Crow era. By Hands Now Known received positive reviews in The New York Times [11] and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History in 2022. [12] It has also won the 2023 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism,and The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. By Hands Now Known was also a finalist for the 2022 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction,and has been named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker,Oprah Daily,Kirkus,Chicago Public Library,and Publishers Weekly. [13]
Burnham's father was Louis E. Burnham,an activist and journalist. Her sister,Linda Burnham,is also an activist and journalist. Her brother,Charles Burnham,is a violinist and composer. She is also related to Forbes Burnham,the second president of Guyana. [14]
Irene Amos Morgan,later known as Irene Morgan Kirkaldy,was an African-American woman from Baltimore,Maryland,who was arrested in Middlesex County,Virginia,in 1944 under a state law imposing racial segregation in public facilities and transportation. She was traveling on an interstate bus that operated under federal law and regulations. She refused to give up her seat in what the driver said was the "white section". At the time she worked for a defense contractor on the production line for B-26 Marauders.
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Michelle Alexander is an American writer,attorney,and civil rights activist. She is best known for her 2010 book The New Jim Crow:Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Since 2018,she has been an opinion columnist for the New York Times.
The Northeastern University School of Law (NUSL) is the law school of Northeastern University in Boston,Massachusetts.
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Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company,64 MCC 769 (1955) is a landmark civil rights case in the United States in which the Interstate Commerce Commission,in response to a bus segregation complaint filed in 1953 by a Women's Army Corps (WAC) private named Sarah Louise Keys,broke with its historic adherence to the Plessy v. Ferguson separate but equal doctrine and interpreted the non-discrimination language of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 as banning the segregation of black passengers in buses traveling across state lines.
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws introduced in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that enforced racial segregation,"Jim Crow" being a pejorative term for an African American. Such laws remained in force until 1965. Formal and informal segregation policies were present in other areas of the United States as well,even as several states outside the South had banned discrimination in public accommodations and voting. Southern laws were enacted by white-dominated state legislatures (Redeemers) to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by African Americans during the Reconstruction era. Such continuing racial segregation was also supported by the successful Lily-white movement.
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