Cumberland School of Law’s Center for Civil Rights & The Law will host a fall film series. Samford students, faculty and staff are invited to attend.

Upcoming Screenings

Scottsboro: An American Tragedy

Tuesday, Sept. 8, 4:30-6 p.m.

The Oscar-nominated PBS documentary Scottsboro: An American Tragedy tells the story of the 1931 Scottsboro case, which produced two landmark Supreme Court decisions still taught in law schools today: Powell v. Alabama, establishing the constitutional right to counsel, and Norris v. Alabama, striking down the systematic exclusion of Black citizens from juries. The case also has a direct Cumberland connection—Circuit Judge James Edwin Horton, a Cumberland School of Law graduate, set aside a guilty verdict he believed unjust, a decision that cost him his seat on the bench.

Becoming Thurgood: America’s Social Architect

Tuesday, Sept. 22, 4:30-5:45 p.m.

The recent PBS documentary Becoming Thurgood: America’s Social Architect supplies the legal architecture of the civil rights movement. It traces Thurgood Marshall from Howard Law through his 29-of-32 record before the Supreme Court and the strategy behind Brown v. Board of Education, centering the lawyer’s craft in a way tailored to our audience. It draws on Marshall’s own eight-hour oral history.

Just Mercy

Tuesday, Oct. 6, 4-6:30 p.m.

Just Mercy portrays Bryan Stevenson's defense of Walter McMillian—wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in Monroeville—brings the series home to Alabama and squarely into the present. 

Shuttlesworth

Tuesday, Nov. 10, 4:30-5:30 p.m.

Raised in segregated Birmingham and nearly killed when the Klan planted a bomb beneath his bed, civil rights activist Fred Shuttlesworth emerged to become the local engine of the Birmingham campaign—co-founding the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and repeatedly putting his own body between the movement and Bull Connor’s police.