Summer Program Teaches Law To Southern Negro Students

The Law School is conducting a special summer program to introduce young Negro students to the study of law.

Under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, 40 undergraduates from South Negro colleges are being provided with the opportunity to come into a contact with a profession which they otherwise might not have considered, according to O'Neal Smalls, a third-years student who is a faculty and administrative assistant for the project. Smalls explained that there is a pressing need for young Negro lawyers in the world today. The Negro's defense of his civil rights and the effective use of his growing political power afford unparalleled opportunities for Negroes in the legal profession, he said.

He pointed out that of the 65,000 law students in the United States, only about 730 are Negroes, and most of these are from Southern schools. Despite the determined recruiting efforts of several northern law schools, few applicants have been found, Smalls said.

The project, begun by Louis A. Toepfer, vice dean of the Law School, was designed to interest promising young Negroes who often drift into "teaching and preaching" in law as a career.

Smalls explained that the program attempts to highlight those parts of the law which have traditionally been most popular with law students. Eleven professors give courses dealing with torts (legal wrongs for which there are remedies) and contracts, the role of the jury in the American legal system, and some aspects of criminal and constitutional law.

According to Smalls, the interest generated by individual courses extends beyond the classroom. The students begin to think and talk law.

"It broadens your outlook; you reason in a different way," said Lenwood Jackson from Morris Brown college in Atlanta, Ga. "Most of all, it teaches us to consider both sides of a question," said Thomas S. Martin from Benedict College in Columbia, S.C.