The Saint Louis University Black Law Student Association will host a panel entitled “Understanding Reparations: Social Movement, Phantom Menace and Search for Just Recompense,” at 3 p.m. Wednesday, January 26.
The event will be held on the Saint Louis University campus in the law school’s William H. Kniep Courtroom. It is free and open to the public.
The conversation will center on the often controversial call for reparations for Americans of African decent. Reparations is the proposal to compensate slave descendants for the trans-Atlantic slave trade and subsequent, enslavement, period of Jim Crow and present-day discrimination.
Panelists include Adjoa Aivertoro, associate professor of law at the University of Arkansas; Carlton Mark Waterhouse, associate professor of law at Indiana University; Adrienne D. Davis, the William M. Van Cleve Professor of Law at Washington University.
“In order to be a true democracy, reparations must be made to African descendants in the United States,” said Aivertoro, who graduated cum laude from SLU Law School, where she was a member of the Black Law Student Association.
Aivertoro began her legal career as a staff attorney in the Civil Rights Division for the U.S. Department of Justice. Throughout her career, she has been a consistent advocate for people of color, women and other oppressed people.
“I have been an advocate for reparations for African descendants since the 1980s,” she said. “I see the panel as another opportunity to educate people about reparations.”
Waterhouse is known for his scholarship on reparations. While attending Howard law school, which he decided to attend because of its tradition of civil rights advocacy, he was an intern for the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights under Law and participated in the development of the 1992 Civil Rights Act.
Davis attended Yale for both college and law school. She is co-editor of the book Privileged Revealed: How Invisible Preference Undermines America. Her research has focused on theories of justice and reparations, and legal dimensions of American slavery.