Please join leading legal scholars for a virtual six-week event series about policing, Black lives, and racial inequality over Zoom
This event series will address recent and past incidents of police violence against African-Americans, as well as the roots of institutional racial violence, its contemporary manifestations, and anti-racist protests. Click to learn more about this event series and register here.
WEEK 1 SPEAKER, June 23, 6-7:15 p.m.
Adrienne Davis, Vice Provost and the William M. Van Cleve Professor of Law, WUSTL
The Long Assault on the Black Body: From Slavery to Emmett Till
Description: From the moment European ships arrived on the western coasts of Africa, Black bodies have been under assault by Western European law and political systems. This discussion will focus on what makes the United States’ own system of enslavement uniquely brutal and indefensible. It will begin with a brief history of the violence of enslavement and conclude with a discussion about the failure of the legal system to redress the torture and murder of Emmett Till in 1955. This historical background necessarily informs our current moment, what I call “the long summer of Black death.”
