CENTURIES OF COURAGEOUS ACTION
Gloria Browne-Marshall
Tuesday, November 14, 2023
4:30 p.m. Craft Talk, Multi-Purpose Room, Campus Center West Addition
7:30 p.m. Conversation, New York State Bar Association, Great Hall, 1 Elk St., Albany
Registration required for the evening event:
Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is a civil rights attorney who has litigated cases for the Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She’s also an author, playwright, and professor of constitutional law at John Jay College (CUNY).
Her newest book, She Took Justice: The Black Woman, Law, and Power – 1619 to 1969 (2020), recounts three centuries of courageous actions taken by Black women in the face of racial prejudice and gender oppression, from Queen Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba (1583-1663) to U.S. Congresswoman and Presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm (1924-2005). Historian Blanche Wiesen Cook said, “Vividly written and profoundly researched…. This timely and riveting book is urgently needed, now!”
Browne-Marshall will be in conversation with Henry M. Greenberg, shareholder at Greenberg, Traurig, past president of the New York State Bar Association and chair of the Commission to Reimagine the Future of New York's Courts.

(Photo credit: Ernest Marshall
Browne-Marshall is the founder and director of The Law and Policy Group, Inc., a nonprofit organization which produces the biennial "Report on the Status of Black Women and Girls(R)," the only ongoing national report on the state of Black females in America. She is a member of the National Press Club, Dramatist Guild, Mystery Writers of America, National Association of Black Journalists, and PEN American Center. She received the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Justice Award for her work with civil rights and women's justice issues.
Cosponsored by the Honors College, UAlbany’s 3+3 joint degree with Albany Law School, the New York State Bar Association, Historical Society of the New York Courts, and the Women In Law Section of the New York State Bar Association.
About the book
Vividly written and profoundly researched, Gloria Browne-Marshall has gifted us with the lives of bold brilliant women of African descent who fought for freedom, equality, dignity. This timely and riveting book is urgently needed, now! --
Blanche Wiesen Cook, author, Eleanor Roosevelt, Vols I, II, III
"Gloria Browne-Marshall has written a powerful primer for everyone in America who needs to know that Black women have never needed to be saved." -- Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author, The Condemnation of Blackness. Professor of History, Race and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School
"Browne-Marshall lifts the voices of these Black women so that the world may see the depths to which they have succumbed and the ground they have covered in their quest to liberate and advocate for social justice." --
Brenda M. Greene, Professor of English and Founder/Executive Director of the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College (CUNY)
"Scholar-Activist Gloria Browne-Marshall has done it again. She took Justice is a tour-de-force. These Black women, despite the racial and gender vagaries of their time, pursued justice at all cost, including the endangerment of their own lives." -- Shaun L. Gabbidon, Distinguished Professor of Criminal Justice, Penn State University-Harrisburg
