Mission Week Speakers Encourage Deep Efforts to Learn About Others

The relationship between Sharon Morgan and Thomas DeWolf did not get off to a good start. They met at a conference in Virginia. She was a black woman from Chicago, a successful communications writer with a strong interest in genealogy. The descendant of people deeply involved in the slave trade, he was a white man who was the executive director of a West Coast-based nonprofit that focused on the continuing impact of slavery in America.

She was put off by him. He was not sure how to deal with her. But step by step, they got to know each other and had break-through conversations about their backgrounds.

During an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” program at Marquette Law School on Tuesday, DeWolf said, “What we got to was revealing ourselves to each other in ways that we were taking off the masks. . . . The masks, if you’re willing, can come off.”

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Law School’s Schoone Fellow Describes Wisconsin’s Legal History in “On the Issues” Program

Joseph A. Ranney says his interest in almost two centuries of Wisconsin’s legal system stands on two things. One is as simple as this: “I love history.” The other is the large amount of time he has spent reading old volumes of Wisconsin legal records as a student and as a lawyer.

His passion for the subject has made Ranney, the Adrian P. Schoone Fellow in Wisconsin Law and Legal Institutions at Marquette University Law School and a partner with the firm of DeWitt Ross & Stevens in Madison, an expert on Wisconsin’s legal history. His most recent book, Wisconsin and the Shaping of American Law, was published in 2017 by the University of Wisconsin Press.

During an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” program in the Lubar Center in Eckstein Hall on Wednesday, Ranney talked about trends in Wisconsin’s legal history and some of the important and sometimes colorful episodes in that history, going back to the 1820s when Wisconsin was a territory and it was a challenge to get people to respect what judges did.

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Scholar Spotlights Role of Coretta Scott King in Her Husband’s Work

If you want to understand the full breadth of the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., you need to appreciate two aspects that often don’t get the attention they deserve: The role of his wife, Coretta Scott King, as Martin Luther King’s partner in activism, and the importance both of them attached to the pursuit of social justice beyond a narrower definition of civil rights.

That was an overall theme of a lecture on Martin Luther King’s legacy at Eckstein Hall on Jan. 25 by Clayborne Carson, a history professor at Stanford University, director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, and one of the foremost experts on the King family’s work. Carson has authored several books about the civil rights era and, in 1985, was asked by Coretta Scott King to edit and publish authoritative editions of her husband’s speeches, sermons, and other writing. That led to seven volumes of the papers of King.

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