Teaching 1619: The Legacy of the First Landing as a Frame for Clinical Teaching

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

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This session explores how the NY Times Magazine’s groundbreaking issue, The 1619 Project, has inspired clinical teaching and cross-clinic collaboration. Marking the 400th anniversary of the first landing of a slave ship in North America, the issue includes essays, poems, stories, and art illustrating the persistence of the legacy of slavery. As the introduction notes: “This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: it is the country’s very origin.” Over the year since we proposed this session, its theme has only gained in urgency. The 1619 Project reframes American history with a new origin story, one that touches every client of our clinics. The Project’s readings trace today’s inequities in wealth, access to credit and banking, health outcomes, sentencing and incarceration, and access to transportation, to this origin. The readings describe the economic and political superstructures that slavery created, that reinforced its spread, and that perpetuated its influence. The session will address the legacy of slavery across the areas of our presenters’ work: community economic development and water access rights, consumer law and financial services, and criminal justice. Presenters have used the 1619 materials in their clinic curricula, and have constructed cross-clinic sessions on anti-racism in their schools. Our format will consist of a fishbowl conversation, in which we will ask presenters and participants to discuss these questions: - Why is the legacy of slavery important to our work? - What foundational lawyering skills can we teach through teaching about the legacy of slavery? - How can we collaborate across clinics in teaching the legacy of 1619? Here is the link to The 1619 Project: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/magazine/1619-intro.html