Constitution Day 2024
Brown v. Board of Education at 70: The Making of a Miracle
Tuesday, September 17
12-1 p.m.
Max L. Rowe Auditorium
University of Illinois College of Law
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, Illinois
Featuring:
Brett Gadsden, Associate Professor of History
Northwestern University
This year's campus Constitution Day event will celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark ruling that invalidated racial segregation in public schools. Professor Brett Gadsden (Northwestern University), one of the nation's leading scholars on the Brown decision and its aftermath, will discuss the challenges in bringing and winning the Brown case, the difficulties in actually desegregating the schools after the Court ruled, and what we can learn from the decision seventy years later. Jason Mazzone, Albert E. Jenner, Jr. Professor of Law, will provide commentary.
Free and open to the public.
A limited number of lunches will be available for lecture attendees.
Sponsored by:
Office of the Chancellor
College of Law
Program in Constitutional Theory, History and Law
Livestream available at: https://www.youtube.com/live/qBLjRHZNVRo
About Professor Gadsden
Brett Gadsden is an Associate Professor of African American Studies and History at Northwestern University and a historian of twentieth-century United States and African American history. His first book, "Between North and South: Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth of American Sectionalism," (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) chronicles the three-decades-long struggle over segregated schooling in Delaware, a key border state and important site of civil rights activism, education reform, and white reaction. His manuscript-in-progress, titled “From Protest to Politics: How African Americans Transformed the Presidency” explores the set of historical circumstances that brought African Americans into consultative relationships with presidential candidates and later into key cabinet, sub-cabinet, and other important positions in the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations and opened to them unprecedented access to centers of power in the federal government. He is also the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Studies, Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Libraries, National Academy of Education, Spencer Foundation, Smithsonian Institution, and American Historical Association.
About Constitution Day
On September 17, 1787, thirty-nine of the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia signed the final draft of the U.S. Constitution. It then went to the states for ratification. Today, federal law designates September 17 as Constitution Day and Citizenship Day. Each year, the College of Law hosts a special event on behalf of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to commemorate the occasion.
Learn more about Constitution Day at constitutionday.com