NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Georgetown University law professor Sheryll Cashin will give a talk, "The Failures of Integration: America’s Struggle with Race and Class 50 Years After Brown v. Board of Education," Friday, April 23, at Vanderbilt University.
Her lecture will begin at 4:10 p.m. in the Moore Room of Vanderbilt Law School and is based on her book The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class are Undermining the American Dream.
Cashin, a member of Vanderbilt’s Board of Trust, teaches and writes about politics, government and the urban poor. Prior to joining the Georgetown faculty, she was staff director for the Community Empowerment Board in the Office of the Vice President at the White House. In this position, she developed and oversaw policies to support comprehensive community-based revitalization strategies in distressed urban and rural communities.
She has served as director of community development for the National Economic Council at the White House, where she managed interagency policy development processes for urban policy and community development initiatives.
Also among her experience is work as an associate counsel for the Office of Transition Counsel, an associate at Sirote & Permutt, P.C., and law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and Judge Abner Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Cashin graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt in 1984 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. While at Vanderbilt, she was president of the Black Student Alliance and a Harold Stirling Vanderbilt Scholar. She earned her master’s degree in Jurisprudence (English law) with second highest honors from Oxford University in 1986 and her J.D. cum laude in 1989 from Harvard Law School, where she served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
In 2000, the Association of Vanderbilt Black Alumni honored Cashin with the Walter R. Murray Jr. Distinguished Alumnus Award. She was the first woman to receive the honor. The award recognizes lifetime achievements in personal, professional and community arenas and is named in honor of a 1970 Vanderbilt graduate. Past recipients of the award include Dr. Levi Watkins, the first African American to graduate from the Vanderbilt Medical School and a prominent physician and teacher; Walter Washington, former president of Alcorn State University; Brig. Gen. Kenneth U. Jordon, managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board; and former Atlanta mayor Bill Campbell.
Cashin’s lecture is co-sponsored by the Peabody Center for Education Policy, the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs, Vanderbilt Law School and the Robert Penn Warren Center.
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Media contact: Princine Lewis, (615) 322-NEWS
Princine.l.lewis@vanderbilt.edu