All Bay Area alumni, parents, and friends are invited to join the Black Alumni Council for a faculty presentation featuring Professor Kimberly Norwood, Henry H. Oberschelp Professor of Law at Washington University.  August 2018 will mark four years since the killing of Michael Brown.   The killing rippled through the United States and caused major eruptions in our societal fabric.  A variety of social justice issues were brought to light as a result of Michael Brown’s killing that hot Saturday afternoon in August.  These issues included conversations around citizen and police trust; income targeting of poor communities; separate and unequal education; poor and inadequate access to health care; inadequate housing; unemployment, underemployment and more.  Professor Norwood will explore these issues as they existed in Ferguson in 2014 and then will look at where we are today:  Have things changed for the better or is it just a matter of time before Ferguson erupts again?

Kimberly Jade Norwood is the Henry H. Oberschelp Professor of Law at Washington University School of Law. She completed her undergraduate work at Fordham University in New York. She graduated from law school at the University of Missouri-Columbia where she also became the first Black person in the school’s history to become a member of the prestigious Missouri Law Review.   She clerked for Federal District Court Judge after law school and practiced with Bryan Cave, LLP, before joining the faculty at the School of Law in 1990.  Six years later, she became the first Black female to receive tenure in Washington University’s history. She made history again by becoming the first Black female in Washington University’s history to receive the Distinguished Faculty award in 2015.

At the law school, she has taught a range of courses from personal injury classes to education law and policy based courses.  She recently created and teaches a course titled: Implicit Bias in the Law and in the Legal Profession.  One of her seminars, entitled Race, Class & Education, involves a combination of judges, lawyers, law students, and high school students working together under a high school to law school pipeline program model and has won both local and national awards.  She has taught in China, Japan, the Netherlands, Taiwan, and has supervised public interest externships in Ghana and Kenya.  She also conducts implicit bias workshops around the country with law firms, lawmakers, judges and educators.   

Her first book: Color Matters: Skin Tone Bias & the Myth of a Post-Racial America, was published in 2014.  Her second book: Ferguson’s Fault Lines: The Race Quake that Rocked a Nation was published in 2016.   She is working on a third book now involving the Trope of the Angry Black Woman.

Professor Norwood is currently a Commissioner on the American Bar Association’s Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Profession; is a Commissioner on the Missouri Supreme Court Commission on Racial and Ethnic Fairness; and is a member of the Monitoring Team for the U.S v. Ferguson Consent Decree. She has served as a Commissioner on the American Bar Association’s Commission on Diversity and Inclusion 360 and co-chaired its implicit bias committee. She is a member of the American Law Institute, a Fellow with the American Bar Foundation, and has various other community affiliations.
 Professor Norwood is married to Ronald Alan Norwood, a partner at Lewis Rice LLP.  The couple has five children.

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