John Payton
John Payton, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, will deliver the J. Alston Atkins Memorial Lecture in Constitutional Law at Winston-Salem State University on Thursday, October 15. The lecture begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Anderson Conference Center’s Dillard Auditorium.
Payton has defended some of the most important civil rights cases in the U.S. in recent years. As the lead counsel for the University of Michigan, he successfully defended the use of race in the admission process, including the undergraduate school argument before the United States Supreme Court. He was a partner at the Washington, D.C. law firm of Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale and Dorr prior to joining the Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Payton has taught at the Georgetown Law Center, Howard University Law School and Harvard Law School, where he had earned his law degree in 1977.
“We have been fortunate to have such impressive civil rights activists participate in the Atkins Law Lecture,” says Donald J. Reaves, WSSU chancellor. “John Payton joins, among others, Julius Chambers, civil rights activist and former chancellor at N. C. Central University; Lani Guinier, who was the first black woman appointed to a tenured professorship at Harvard Law School; and Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
Payton’s guest appearance for the Atkins Memorial Lecture is sponsored by Kilpatrick Stockton LLP of Winston-Salem. For additional information, contact the WSSU Foundation at mcclarypa@wssu.edu or 336-750-3131.
