Rosemont
Friday, December 6, 2019
Westin O’Hare
6100 North River Road
12:25 – 4:15 p.m.
Program Agenda
12:25 - 12:30 p.m. Welcome and Introductions
Masah S. SamForay, The Foray Firm, Joliet
Juan Thomas, Quintairos, Prieto, Wood & Boyer, Aurora
12:30 – 2:00 p.m. The Summer of 1919 in Chicago and Across America
- The Law, Race, Ethnicity, and Social Practices in Chicago
- Chicago’s Riot Days: July 26-August 3, 1919
- Law and Order—Riot Edition: The Red Summer Across the Rest of America
- The Legal and Social Impact: Housing, Policing, and Society
Prof. Peter Cole, Department of History, Western Illinois University, Macomb
Prof. Adam Green, Department of History, University of Chicago, Chicago
2:00 – 2:15 p.m. Break (refreshments provided)
2:15 – 3:15 p.m. The Need for Diversity in the Fight for Justice*
Examine your own racial biases in this session by learning about and completing the Implicit Association Test (IAT) on your smart phone or tablet. With the historical backdrop of an overview of the development of the NAACP and the National Bar Association, attendees will assess the difficulties that did and still do plague the legal profession. The speakers will facilitate a discussion of the issues and how together we can make those institutional challenges a thing of the past. In light of the lessons learned from the race riots, current issues, and your individual IAT results, you will be asked to identify specific ways you can use this knowledge to advance diversity and inclusion goals in your firms, your peer interactions, the courtroom and the legal profession.
Khara A. Coleman, Office of the Cook County Sheriff, Oak Park
Masah S. SamForay, The Foray Firm, Joliet
Juan Thomas, Quintairos, Prieto, Wood & Boyer, Aurora
3:15 – 4:00 p.m. Justice after the Riots, the Governor’s Commission Report on the Riots, and Looking into the Future
Discover the challenges faced by African Americans in seeking justice after the riots, including what assumptions of bias may have influenced prosecutions, policing, and the judiciary at the time. The speaker will present an overview of how the Governor’s Commission was formed, what assumptions and implicit biases influenced the written report, and what may have prevented the report from resulting in real reform in racial relations. This session will include a discussion of how the legal profession can address the concerns of the report even today to promote access to justice and reform legal inequities in access to housing, education and employment.
Khara Coleman , Office of the Cook County Sheriff, Oak Park
4:00 – 4:15 p.m. Q&A and Closing Comments
Khara Coleman, Office of the Cook County Sheriff, Oak Park
Juan Thomas, Quintairos, Prieto, Wood & Boyer, Aurora
