Hooks Lecturer Will Examine Legacy of Brown vs. Board of Education
For release: September 16, 2003
For press information, contact Gabrielle Maxey

Fifty years after the Supreme Court's historic decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education, the promise of equal educational opportunity for American's black children remains unfulfilled. That will be the subject when noted lawyer and professor Dr. Peter H. Irons opens this year's Benjamin Hooks Lecture Series at the University of Memphis. His talk, "Fifty Years After Brown: The Return of Jim Crow Schools" will begin at 4 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 25, in the Johnson Hall Auditorium.

The event is free and open to the public.

Author of a dozen books on the Supreme Court and constitutional litigation, Irons argues that courts have broken that promise and effectively overruled the Brown decision. He has visited all five of the communities involved in the Brown cases and interviewed students and teachers in the schools where the cases began. His conclusion is that most of them, and many schools in American's cities and suburbs, are still segregated. His latest book is the prize-winning Jim Crow's Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision.

Irons is professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, and a practicing civil rights and civil liberties attorney. In 1988 he was chosen the first Raoul Wallenberg Visiting Professor of Human Rights at Rutgers University. Irons has been invited to lecture on constitutional law and civil liberties at more than 20 law schools, including Harvard, Yale, Berkeley and Stanford.

Irons' talk is sponsored by the U of M's Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change and co-sponsored by the African and African-American Studies program within the Universities College of Arts and Sciences. For more information, call 678-2769.

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