Law professor
Sheryll Cashin went to jail with her mother when she was just four months old.
Joan Cashin had been arrested for participating in civil rights sit-ins in Huntsville, Ala., and her young daughter was with her at the time. And though the baby slept through the incident, other experiences led the future academic to keep up the fight her mother, father and other family members began as far back as the 1800s.
Cashin, who was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in the 1980s, has written extensively on race relations, government and inequality in America. Before joining the Law Center in 1997, the Harvard Law School graduate served in the Clinton White House as an urban and economic policy adviser.
It wasn’t until 2004 that she would write her first book, "The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class are Undermining the American Dream,” which received critical praise in The New York Times Book Review and other publications.
Her new book is much more personal. “The Agitator’s Daughter: A Memoir of Four Generations of One Extraordinary African-American Family”(PublicAffairs, 2008) is about her own family, from slavery through the post-civil rights era. Cashin writes about her great-grandfather Herschel Cashin, who was elected to the Alabama State Legislature during Reconstruction and became one of the first black lawyers in the state.
“I was enormously proud to be the descendant of a man who managed to pursue a profession I longed to enter, and I marveled that he did it at a time when most blacks seemed to be oppressed by the law,” Cashin writes in the new book.
New Journey
“It’s a new journey for me,” Cashin says of the book. “I was trying to recapture or celebrate the values that I think lead to success, without being too preachy or didactic -- to explain to people how you can be successful in American society.”
Her father, John Logan Cashin Jr., was determined to carry on his grandfather Herschel’s legacy in his own era and became heavily involved in the Civil Rights Movement.
The professor’s parents fought segregation and helped secure voting rights for African-Americans in 1960s Alabama. John Cashin also ran for governor against rabid segregationist George Wallace in 1970. Though he lost, Cashin carried more votes than any other candidate in the general election.
The Cashins were gutsy. Their activism would lead to economic ruin and death threats, including a bullet through the family’s living room window. But through it all, there were definitely moments of triumph. Cashin tells how her parents managed to desegregate Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry in 1963 -- by walking into the venue dressed to the nines with a white couple dressed as their butler and maid.
“They had reframed the issue,” Cashin writes. “Would their white servants be excluded? Of course not. An usher respectfully escorted the foursome to their seats.”
Race and American Law
Cashin didn’t originally intend to be a lawyer -- her undergraduate degree is in electrical engineering from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. But she says the lure of her great-grandfather Herschel’s legacy was strong, and Cashin entered Harvard after studying English law at Oxford University.
And while she never planned to practice law, she says she now relishes the fact that she’s a member of the Alabama bar, since her uncle -- also named Herschel after their common ancestor -- was refused that honor in the 1950s because of his race. Ironically, her great-grandfather Herschel had been admitted to the same bar during the 1870s.
“That meant a lot to me, to be admitted to the Alabama bar,” Cashin says. “I remember the ceremony. I was consciously thinking about the fact that my Uncle Herschel had been kept out of practicing law.”
After clerking for Marshall and Judge Abner Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and spending a few years with the Clinton administration, she began to chart her next move, which led her to Georgetown.
“I had a lot of the credentials that aspiring law professors have, and I was counseled by friends, ‘you ought to teach,’ ” she says. “I came to Georgetown not being sure whether I wanted to be a tenure-track academic, but here I am 12 years later, and I could not imagine being any happier doing anything else.”
Cashin teaches constitutional law, local government law and property law at Georgetown, and this fall will teach a new course, Race and American Law.
Jane Dimyan-Ehrenfeld (L’09) called Cashin’s property law class a favorite among students in her first-year section.
“We respected the intellectual rigor and honesty she brought to the class, appreciated the clarity with which she laid out the concepts, enjoyed her sense of humor and walked out of the class at the end of the semester feeling as if we had learned a tremendous amount,” Dimyan-Ehrenfeld says.
Second-year law student
Brandon Tyree (L’10) says Cashin enjoys talking with her students and listening to what they have to say.
“She shares stories about her two young boys, her time in the Clinton administration, (her) clerking stories and (she) is interested in hearing the stories her students have to share,” he says. “I consider myself lucky to count her as one of my professors.”
All of Cashin’s experience, says fellow law professor
Elizabeth Patterson, allows her to combine a scientific inquiry born of her engineering background with expert legal analytical skills and an abiding commitment to social justice.
“She is an accomplished teacher who challenges her students to think and express themselves at the highest intellectual level,” Patterson says. “I treasure her as a colleague who enriches the Georgetown Law Center community, the legal community in general and our country with her incisive examination of issues relating to race and the law.”
While Cashin says she tries to keep her personal opinions out of the classroom, she did use her property class to tell the story, described in her book, about how the City of Huntsville once took her father’s dental office through eminent domain and ultimately transferred it to a bank.
“My family’s personal history has more animated my writing than my classroom experience,” she says.
Her new Race and American law course will give her more of a direct opportunity to share some of her family’s contributions to American legal history. Her father’s political party, the National Democratic Party of Alabama (NDPA), brought the 1969 case
Hadnott v. Amos to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that Alabama state officials had no right to keep NDPA candidates off the ballot.
Cashin’s great-uncle, Newlyn Cashin testified for the defense in the infamous “Scottsboro Boys” case of the 1930s, in which nine black youths were falsely accused of raping two white women. His testimony, Cashin says, helped the Supreme Court to ultimately decide in the 1935 case of
Norris v. Alabama that African-Americans had been unlawfully excluded from the jury.
“My father always talked about how Uncle Newlyn had testified at the Scottsboro Boys trial … and I was wowed by that,” Cashin says.
The book has allowed Cashin to relive and honor her memories.
“In following my family’s trajectory through the arc of American race struggles, I celebrate the generations of African-American strivers who endured and thrived in the 19th and 20th centuries,” Cashin says. “And I celebrate those, especially my father, who chose to confront the major injustices of their times.
