Professor Margaret Burnham, faculty co-director of the Center for Law, Equity and Race and director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, has spent a lifetime demanding that history and the US justice system account for the worst transgressions perpetrated in the Jim Crow South and beyond. In April, her colleagues, students and fellow travelers came together for a symposium to honor that work, celebrate Burnham’s retirement and recommit to carrying the torch forward.

The symposium, We Count and Contest: Reflections on Retrospective Justice, brought together academics, activists, law school graduates, members of the judiciary and the legendary Angela Davis for a day of tribute to Burnham’s singular career as a lawyer, judge, teacher and civil rights leader. Again and again, speakers returned to the same portrait — that of a brilliant strategist and intrepid advocate who taught her students to represent clients with compassion and without judgment, paying attention to every detail and to the long arc of history. The symposium was organized by Professor Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, director of Africana Studies.

1. The Honorable Geraldine Hines (left) and Joseph Feaster Jr. ’75 were among those who participated in a panel “Boston Genealogies and Futurities: Race, Resistance and Law.”
2. Margaret Burnham (right) with her friend since childhood, Angela Davis. In the early 1970s, Burnham represented Davis in a highly publicized trial.
3. At the end of the symposium, Embrace Boston’s leaders, President and CEO Imari Paris Jeffries (left) and the Rev. Jeffrey Brown (right), co-founder and co-chair, announced that Burnham’s name will join the roster of Boston civil rights leaders and trailblazers honored at the sculpture The Embrace and the 1965 Freedom Plaza on the Boston Common.
4. A panel, “Theory to Practice, Classroom to Courtroom,” offered some of the day’s most moving moments. Professor Rose Zoltek-Jick delivered an eloquent account of CRRJ’s origins, followed by four graduates, Kaylie Simon ’11 (pictured), Rev. Willie Bodrick II ’20, Tara Dunn Jackson ’17 and Mary Nguyen ’14, who spoke about how Burnham profoundly shaped not just their legal training but also their sense of what the law is for and how it can be used for reparative justice. They also recounted wonderful memories of moments shared with Burnham, often feared but always loved.