Campbell Law Professor Delivers Black History Month Lecture

The College of Law helped to kick off campus Black History Month observances with a lecture from Campbell Law School Assistant Professor Amos Jones, "The Dismantling of De Jure Segregation in Kentucky: How Slave Religion, Strategic Voting, and Creative Lawyering Broke Barriers in a Socially Advanced Border State." The lecture was was co-sponsored by the UK Martin Luther King, Jr. Cultural Center, Black Law Students Association, Black Student Union, NAACP, Minorities in Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Related Sciences, and Program in African-American and Africana Studies.

Professor Jones teaches Contracts at Campbell University School of Law and also investigates legal remedies for racial, religious, and national-origin discrimination.

“Kentucky presents some surprising and delightful contrasts to the typical historical narrative of post-Reconstruction Southern racism,” Jones said. “My objective was to empower students and to engage colleagues in re-imagining widely held assumptions in light of very colorful historical realities in Kentucky. I shared accounts, for example, of Vice President Richard Johnson’s insistence on social equality for his half-black daughters and his half-black common-law wife in the 1830s, as well as Mary Todd Lincoln’s granting land in 1862 to a dissident group of church folk determined to back the Union, thus forming the city’s third black Baptist church that stands to this day next door to her family home on Lexington’s Main Street.”

Pictures from the event are available on the College of Law’s flickr page.

Audio and video recordings of the event will be available shortly.