Maine Fellows Cocktail Reception and Dinner

$25 per person. Open to Fellows and nominees only. 

Featured Presentation: “The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era” with Christopher Schmidt (ABF Research Professor, Professor of Law, Chicago-Kent College of Law)

Join Christopher Schmidt for a keynote in reference to his published book, The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era.

On February 1, 1960, four African American college students entered the Woolworth department store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and sat down at the lunch counter. This lunch counter, like most in the American South, refused to serve black customers. The four students remained in their seats until the store closed. In the following days, they returned, joined by growing numbers of fellow students. These “sit-in” demonstrations soon spread to other southern cities, drawing in thousands of students and coalescing into a protest movement that would transform the struggle for racial equality.

The Sit-Ins tells the story of the student lunch counter protests and the national debate they sparked over the meaning of the constitutional right of all Americans to equal protection of the law. Christopher W. Schmidt describes how behind the now-iconic scenes of African American college students sitting in quiet defiance at “whites only” lunch counters lies a series of underappreciated legal dilemmas—about the meaning of the Constitution, the capacity of legal institutions to remedy different forms of injustice, and the relationship between legal reform and social change.

Copies of the book will be available for pre-order with registration and available for purchase on-site.

5:30- Cocktail Hour

6:30- Dinner

7:30- Keynote Presentation