Carter began to garner a bit of widespread attention in 2018, when her grandson Stephen L. Carter published Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster. Several years earlier, the writers of the HBO show Boardwalk Empire created a character who, like Carter, was largely responsible for the conviction of a Prohibition-era mobster. (At the time, the character spurred mocking among viewers, who were sure that such a person—a Black female prosecutor—was pure fantasy.)

In Eunice Hunton Carter: A Lifelong Fight for Social Justice, Marilyn Greenwald and Yun Li use transcripts, letters, and other archival sources to illuminate Carter’s rich life, from her participation in the Harlem Renaissance and her devising the strategy that would crack open the Luciano case to her involvement with the United Nations and the Pan-African Congress, which helped increase awareness of racism and spur independence movements. Despite all this, though, the authors note that she was “low-key” and “she didn’t boast about her accomplishments.”

Born in Atlanta, she grew up in a family dedicated to social justice. Her father, William Alphaeus Hunton, was a Black YMCA administrator who fought to establish facilities for people of color. And Carter’s mother, Adelina “Addie” Hunton, “never one to remain stationary and tend to the home,” traveled extensively as a civil rights activist and women’s suffragist, including to France during World War I to help rally Black U.S. troops serving there.

Carter earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Smith College—only the second woman in Smith history to earn both within four years. After graduating from Fordham Law School in 1932, she started a private law practice. But it was her 1935 appointment to special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey’s “Twenty Against the Underworld” legal team that ultimately led to her lasting renown.

As the authors write, “Carter’s decades-long commitment to organizations that furthered racial equality in this country and overseas has long been a footnote in the story of the nation’s civil rights and feminist movements,” but her “dogged determination, fearlessness, and devotion to hard work” allowed her to shape history. Carter followed in her parents’ footsteps when she became a national leader of the YWCA and a member of the U.S. National Council of Negro Women, taking up William’s YMCA torch and Addie’s dedication to women’s suffrage. She served as the liaison to the Women’s Day Court when she was an assistant district attorney, as well.

Fordham Law School recently established the annual Eunice Carter Lecture in her honor. Earlier this month, Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project” and author of the new book The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, delivered the inaugural lecture.

During the event, held via Zoom and in person at the Lincoln Center campus, Fordham Law Professor Catherine Powell shared some reflections on Carter with a combined audience of more than 500 people, including Carter’s great-granddaughter Leah.

“When I looked up Eunice’s story and realized her work at the U.N.—in advancing the status of women—and her work with the Pan-African Congress, I thought this woman actually embodies the kind of work that I’ve been trying to do since graduating from law school,” Powell said. “Your great-grandmother worked on these issues before we had the term ‘intersectionality.’”

Leah Carter said she believes her great-grandmother would have been “incredibly honored” by the event. “Eunice blazed trails and broke glass ceilings. And, like so many who do, she gained power and influence within deeply imperfect institutions,” she said. “But she tried to make a difference where she could.”

The annual PROSE Awards, given by the Association of American Publishers since 1976, honor authors, editors, and publishers of works that exhibit scholarly excellence and significantly advance their fields.

Speech Acts, which kicks off this week, will bring together high-profile speakers such as George Stephanopoulos and Nikole Hannah-Jones for eight panels and lectures to address an issue that has become increasingly fraught over the last few years.

“We’ve had a long-standing ferment in society, in the culture, and perhaps most intensely, on American campuses, about freedom of speech—what you can do, what you can say, and what can be discussed and in what form,” said David Gibson, the director of Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture.

The center addressed the topic in March when it held a discussion on cancel culture, and over the summer, Fordham Provost Dennis Jacobs, Ph.D., asked faculty to propose their own ways to talk about what Gibson called “the lifeblood of university life”—the free and open exchange of ideas.

The first panel, “Political Discourse in a Polarized Age,” will take place Thursday, Oct. 7, from 3:30 to 5 p.m. at the Lincoln Center campus. It will feature Stephanopoulos; Kristen Soltis Anderson, a pollster and author of The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (And How Republicans Can Keep Up) (Broadside Books, 2015); Robert Talisse, Ph.D., professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University; and Roshni Nedungadi, a partner at HIT Strategies. Monika McDermott, Ph.D., professor of political science, will moderate.

Hannah-Jones will speak on Feb. 1. Jones, the creator of the New York Times’ “1619 Project” on American slavery and its consequences, was denied tenure at the University of North Carolina in June, and subsequently joined the faculty of Howard University. Her story generated enormous debates about academic freedom, and lawmakers in Arkansas, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, and South Dakota introduced bills to ban teaching the “1619 Project” in schools. She will be interviewed by Janai Nelson, associate director and counsel at the NAACP.

Catherine Powell, a professor at Fordham’s School of Law who was instrumental in inviting Hannah-Jones, said her work is key to understanding how the United States is undergoing a backlash similar to the one that happened in the 1960s in reaction to the civil rights movement.

“As a society, we’re currently having a debate about who gets to speak, who gets heard, and whose ideas are valid,” she said.

Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project has been a major force in this debate, she said.

“That was a way to make visible certain ideas and certain histories that many Americans have been unaware of, that the history of Black Americans goes back 400 years, not just to the country’s founding,” she said.

Powell said it’s crucial that the educators are committed to the truth and shun “alternative facts” and disinformation.

“At the same time, it’s important that the university is a place where all ideas are welcome, even unpopular ones and unpopular speech, that we learn to be agreeable to being disagreed with, and that we learn from each other,” she said.

“Being open to the possibility that our ideas may evolve, and hearing others in a place where we can each speak freely and respect each other is critical to learning.”

The lectures represent the depth and breadth of the expertise of Fordham faculty. Miguel Alzola, a professor from the Gabelli School of Business, will moderate a panel on Oct. 15 titled “Is Free Expression at Risk in U.S. Organizations?” Abner Greene, a professor at the School of Law, will moderate “The Promise and Limits of Our First Amendment,” on Jan. 26. And associate professor of communications Jesse Baldwin-Phillippi, Ph.D., will moderate “Speech Impacts: ‘Cancel Culture’ and the Consequences of Our Words” on Nov. 4.

The Center on Religion and Culture is contributing with “The Quality of Mercy: Justice, Forgiveness, and Public Discourse,” a panel in the spring on a date to be determined. Gibson said the plan is to explore whether American culture is inflicted with a puritanical streak that leads people to be intolerant and unmerciful toward others, as well as incapable of forgiveness.

“My biggest concern is that that we only attempt to approach this through the lens of rights, or policies, or grievance, and I think we need to approach this from a spiritual and social perspective. This is about our relationships with each other,” he said.

As for the series, Gibson said he’s optimistic that there will be healthy disagreement among participants and audience members.

“More than any particular topic, speaker, or event, I hope the fact of holding this series will contribute to a solution because you’re going to bring people together in a space to discuss these things,” he said.

“What we’re trying to do is to model what good speech looks like, what a constructive environment for education looks like.”

In-person attendance for the series is limited to the Fordham community, but the series will be live-streamed. Register here.

The event featured presentations from Catherine Powell, J.D., professor of law, on the color and gender of COVID; Christina Greer, Ph.D., associate professor of political science on being Black in Biden’s America; and Michele Prettyman, Ph.D., assistant professor of communication and media studies on the politics of the Black image of rebirth. The webinar was hosted by Laurie Lambert, associate professor of African and African American Studies.

“Let me start with what I call the ‘color of COVID,’” Powell said. “I start with our current inflection point, our moment of interlocking pandemics of COVID-19, economic insecurity, and inequality.”

Powell said that we must examine the race and gender issues built into the COVID-19 pandemic to understand how this crisis relates to economic and social injustice. With Black and Latinx populations being overrepresented among essential workers, they’ve been exposed to COVID-19 more, she said. And they are more likely to have pre-existing conditions and live in congregate settings, which is part of why they’ve been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, she said, both in terms of health and finances.

One way to think about addressing these pandemics is through a “viral convergence,” she said, a twist on civil rights scholar Derrick’s Bell’s theory of “interest convergence,” which argued that Black people have been able to achieve civil rights victories only when white and Black interests align.

“My idea of viral convergence is a recuperative project—one that seeks to span our shared and differential interests,” she said. “It calls for the adoption of transformative laws to reinforce our shared and unifying elements of our current crisis, while also addressing our differential vulnerabilities, whether in the context of the cross racial nature of the movement for Black Lives, or the rise of urban-suburban alliances that are paving the way for large scale inclusive politics.”

Greer said the alliances Powell discussed were instrumental in electing President Joe Biden. But she also noted that the current political landscape includes a “swinging pendulum” that moved dramatically from the first African American president to Donald Trump. That swing has brought large, overarching questions about how Black people are thinking about their roles in the country, she said.

“Can Black people ever be full citizens in this country? Can anyone who’s not white ever be a full citizen in this country, especially after what we just experienced for the past four years, and especially what we saw over January 6?” Greer said.

Biden, to start, has made efforts to swing the pendulum back, including putting together one of the most “inclusive cabinets,” Greer said. But he also has to deal with the historical context of these “multiple pandemics.” and “systemic inequalities.”

One way to continue to swing the pendulum, Greer said, is through the combination of “protest politics” and “electoral politics.”

“Black people in this country have never gotten anything without the duality of both,” Greer said. And I think a lot more Americans are understanding the power of protest politics, to change policy and to change electoral politics.”

Protests are some of the most common images depicted in the media of Black people and others fighting for justice, Prettyman said. She showed the image of TIME magazine’s cover from the Baltimore uprisings in 2015, featuring a photo of a Black man running from police. She asked everyone to consider what a “revolutionary image” might be in this time.

“As we consider this notion of a revolutionary image, I wonder, is it an image of protest, a visual articulation of defiance or resistance?” she said. Or, she said, “perhaps a revolutionary image is one that challenges that paradigm and offers us one of intimacy or care.”

Prettyman showed images from protests and from movies such as Judas and the Black Messiah, where Fred Hampton, a Black Panther leader from Illinois as played by Daniel Kaluuya, is depicted giving a rousing speech. She contrasted those to more everyday images of Black people working, living, experiencing joy.

“Is it possible that that is also a revolutionary image? Perhaps still, a revolutionary image is one that simply shows the everyday life of Black people doing nothing spectacular, nothing dramatic, titillating, or comedic?”

Lambert said these presentations worked together in a way “that’s blown my mind.”

“As we move through these dual pandemics, I thought that was great to ask us to reconsider images of joy and care and intimacy, and everyday life—seeking those out, finding those, but also thinking of them as the spaces of possibility where some of this work is going to be done,” she said.