Two University of Wisconsin Law School graduates, Stacy L. Leeds (LL.M. 2000) and Kimberlé Crenshaw (LL.M. 1985) have been named Fletcher Fellows for 2008. Both Leeds and Crenshaw received their Master of Law degrees as William H. Hastie Fellows at the Law School.
Four Fletcher fellowships have been awarded nationally to scholars whose work seeks to improve racial equality in the American society. Each Fellow receives a grant of $50,000 for a project to be completed within one year. The recipients were chosen from a pool of more than 80 applicants.
Stacy Leeds is Professor of Law at the University of Kansas School of Law and Director of the university’s Tribal Law and Government Center. For her Fletcher Fellowship project, she will continue work on the book Ties That Bind: Freedmen Citizenship and the Cherokee Nation, a comprehensive history of African-American slaves held by the Cherokee Nation until the 1860s.
While a Justice of the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court, Leeds authored the majority opinion in Allen v. Cherokee Nation, upholding the tribal citizenship rights of the freedmen.
Kimberlé Crenshaw is Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia Law Schools. She will complete the project Shattering the Colorblind Ruse: Recapturing the Legacy of Brown, which argues that the concept of ‘colorblindness’ undermines the ability to address ongoing patterns of racial inequality.
The other newly named Fletcher Fellows are Clayborne Carson, Professor of History at Stanford University and founding director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute; and Kellie Jones, Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University.
Dr. Henry Louis Gates, the Alphonse Fletcher Professor at Harvard University, who chaired the selection committee for the 2008 fellows, commented that the Fletcher program is "the only one of its kind," engaged in helping Americans "see how far we have come and how far we still have to go in our efforts to meet the challenge of Brown v. Board of Education."
Submitted by on July 16, 2008
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