Angela Onwuachi-Willig among Five Black Women Law Deans Honored for Efforts to Bring Antiracist Reform to Legal Education
Together, they launched a project to engage law schools in fight for racial justice
Angela Onwuachi-Willig, BU School of Law dean and professor of law, one of the country’s leading scholars of race and the law, is one of five Black women law deans to receive the Association of American Law Schools’ inaugural Impact Award. Photo (left) by Doug Levy.
Angela Onwuachi-Willig is one of the country’s leading scholars of race and the law, but in a letter addressing her students after the killing of George Floyd, she confessed that she had struggled over what she would say to them. As a Black woman and law school dean—the first dean of color at Boston University’s School of Law and first Black woman to lead a top 20 law school—Onwuachi-Willig wrote that she wondered if she could say anything publicly, “imagining the backlash when certain words come out of my Black mouth.”
“Perhaps surprising to some of you, racism regularly disempowers the seemingly powerful dean,” wrote Onwuachi-Willig, who was appointed as dean, and professor of law, in 2018.
Her letter, in which she spoke of her anguish over the never-ending cycle of state violence against Black people, and of her fears for her two Black sons and one Black daughter whenever they step outside, was only the beginning. She and four other Black women law deans—Danielle M. Conway, Penn State Dickinson Law; Carla D. Pratt, Washburn University School of Law; Danielle Holley-Walker, Howard University School of Law; and Kimberly Mutcherson, Rutgers Law School—had all encouraged each other to come forward. But now they wanted to move beyond public statements, to engage law schools in the fight for racial justice through teaching, scholarship, admissions, faculty hiring, and activism.
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