On Feb. 6, Samford University Cumberland School of Law hosted the 31st annual Thurgood Marshall Symposium. Named in honor of the first Black U.S. Supreme Court justice, the symposium honors Thurgood Marshall’s legacy by addressing historical and contemporary issues that affect minority communities. The 2025 event recognized the 70th anniversary of the 1954 milestone case Brown v. Board of Education in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separating children in public schools based on race was unconstitutional.

 

Victor Jones, senior counsel at the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund Defense, served as the 2025 keynote speaker. In his role, Jones litigates school desegregation and other education cases in federal courts and has helped thousands of children in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama obtain the equal educational opportunities they are constitutionally entitled to.

 

In his discussion titled “Brown v. Board at 70: Reflecting on its Fulfilled and Unfulfilled Promises in Alabama”, Jones emphasized that desegregation goes beyond the classroom setting and must be achieved with respect to many factors including facilities, staff, faculty, extracurricular activities and transportation. Jones explained how these factors were applied in practice by revealing several counties in the south that were under desegregation orders, some of which were home to people in the symposium audience. 

 

The 2025 event was hosted by Cumberland School of Law’s Black Law Students Association (BLSA) in coordination with the law school’s new Civil Rights Center.

 

Tristan Gardner, a second-year law student, BLSA member and co-chair of the 2025 symposium, said, “Each year the Thurgood Marshall Symposium is an opportunity for people to listen to a courageous individual share the ways in which they are embodying the legacy of Justice Marshall through their career as an attorney. Attorney Jones’s lecture about the fulfilled and unfulfilled promises of Brown serves as a stark reminder that there is no room for complacency in the fight for equal opportunity and equal access in education for our children, and that the only steps that should be taken in that fight is forward, not backwards.”