“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>Students at the Saint Louis University School of Law this fall will have the opportunity to take personal injury law from a new professor, Justin Hansford. But this 29-year-old scholar will hit his stride next spring, when he first teaches legal ethics at SLU.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>“I plan to specialize in ethics,” Hansford told
“mso-bidi-font-style: normal;”>The American in teaching students how to be lawyers who fight for the little guy.”
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>A third-generation legacy graduate of Howard University, Hansford advocates in particular for “the little guy” of African descent. So much so that when his law school, Georgetown Law, did not publish a law review with the proper focus to accept the article he had written on the Marcus Garvey case, he forced the university to start one.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>“Up until then, no journal at Georgetown focused on racial injustice,” Hansford said. “They had journals on poverty, international law – everything except racial inequality. We had protests and submitted proposals, and the administration eventually decided to publish this journal.”
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>Hansford’s colleagues in the struggle to form
“mso-bidi-font-style: normal;”>The Journal of Modern Critical Race Perspectives now a criminal defense attorney practicing in Chicago – are precisely the sorts of students he intends to nurture at Saint Louis University.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>“It wasn’t just black students, either,” Hansford said. “Elizabeth Mathos’ family is Portuguese, but she grew up in Africa. She is a white person very much interested in human rights and law, now working in legal aid in Boston. Mathew Cregor is a white American who went on to work at the Southern Poverty Law Center; he uses his law degree to help people.”
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>In a line one expects students will be hearing more often on campus at SLU, Hansford emphasized, “It’s helpful to tell people not all lawyers fit the derogatory stereotypes.”
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”> ‘Jailing a Rainbow’ “mso-special-character: line-break;” />
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>When he is not teaching, Hansford plans to rewrite his essay on Garvey, “Jailing a Rainbow: the Marcus Garvey Case,” into a book. This is work that both corrects the historical record, in Hansford’s opinion, while setting the stage for progress in the crucial arena of economic justice.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>“My thesis is that Marcus Garvey was wrongly convicted of mail fraud, and after this conviction he was later deported and never returned to the U.S.,” Hansford said. “His conviction played a large role leading to the end of his movement. Marcus Garvey’s vision for economic justice suffered from his incarceration and the ultimate marginalization of his movement.”
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>At its height there were almost 5 million members of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. The Black Star Line, its flagship, allegedly was a fraudulent Ponzi scheme, according to prosecutors.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>“My article goes through the facts to prove it wasn’t a Ponzi scheme, it was a legitimate business endeavor – what today would be called social entrepreneurship or a non-profit organization,” Hansford said. “But they critiqued it under the rubric of a for-profit, money-generating endeavor, and they were wrong to do that.”
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>Other factors outside of Garvey’s control were responsible for the decline of the Black Star Line, Hansford argues: the shipping industry experienced a downturn, and a junior FBI agent named J. Edgar Hoover targeted Garvey, using tactics of harassment that would become known as COINTELPRO.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>“Hoover worked on the Garvey case before he became head of the FBI; this was his first big case,” Hansford said. “On the Marcus Garvey case, Hoover conceived of the dastardly tactics he later used – he really created those for Marcus Garvey.”
“font-family: Verdana; line-height: 13px;”>Hansford does not paint a simple portrait of white-dominated government targeting the leader of a black economic self-empowerment movement. He also looks at infighting within the African-American leadership that, he said, led to a critical split that hampers progress of African Americans to this day.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>“I also talk about the ongoing feud between Marcus Garvey and the NAACP. The African-American activists involved fought against each other to their mutual detriment,” Hansford said.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>“I admire all of them – Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, A. Phillip Randolph. But their feuding did more to harm the movement than to help it, and I would hope history doesn’t repeat itself.”
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>He does more than hope for a more productive future. In his scholarship and teaching, he intends to help forge it.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>“Moving forward in the 21st century, there is a great deal of economic inequality affecting African Americans in particular, and I feel that is one of the negative consequences of this feud – as if the goal of civil and political rights were mutually exclusive of economic justice,” Hansford said.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>“Garvey’s program was seen as antithetical to the NAACP program. With that conflict, it was as if you had to choose one or the other, and I feel that is the wrong perspective.”
