Black Students Talk in Boston About Law School Admissions

Harvard Law School and five other schools affiliated with the Combined Boston Black American Law Students' Association conducted its third annual Law Day program Saturday to inform minority undergraduate students about the law school admissions process.

The series of seminars and workshops, held at the New England School of Law in Boston, aimed to recruit minority students from New England area colleges.

Further Past Gains

Richard Taylor, national president of the association and a student at the law school, told a group of about 300 undergraduates Saturday that his major concern was for more minority and black lawyers to further past civil rights gains.

"Advances made by blacks in the '60s have been translated into law and can only be transmitted by the legal profession," Taylor said.

Taylor criticized law school recruiters for "not placing the right emphasis on admissions." He said schools should recruit on a broader base instead of competing for the same few "stars."

Joyce London, vice president of the Massachusetts Black Lawyers Association, spoke of discrimination in the legal profession itself, and cited the low proportion of blacks in the judiciary.

She told the group there is "a grave necessity for you to become practitioners to enforce the rights of blacks and to act as accessible, as well as conceptual, role models for black children."

A special workshop, chaired by Douglas Thomas, a teaching fellow at the law school, spoke of the need for English composition classes at the undergraduate level to help students with admissions application writing, and at the law school level to help graduate students with the writing of briefs and memos.

However, both Thomas and the three law school administrators on the panel pointed out that writing problems extended to all students rather than just to minority students.