Zanita Fenton, professor of law, will never forget the day a client’s estranged husband smuggled a gun into the courthouse and pointed it directly at her and her client. Fenton at the time was a Harvard Law School student, serving as an advocate for victims of domestic abuse.

“He was disarmed pretty quickly, and nobody lost their cool, including myself, which was one of the things I learned,” Fenton says.

In her young but prolific career, Fenton has confronted many difficult issues with an insightful tack and a collegial rapport. She has written numerous articles on domestic violence and on the adoption and foster care issues that black children face. While working at a New York City law firm upon graduating from Harvard, she and a colleague implemented a pro bono program there for victims of domestic abuse.

“My scholarly interest has always focused on anti-subordination, which in our social context means race, gender, poverty, and sexuality,” Fenton says.

Besides the proverbial a-ha moment when students grasp the material she presents, Fenton’s greatest joy in teaching is the ability to encourage activism. While at Wayne State University in Detroit, she organized a demonstration for faculty and students on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court during its ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger, a decision that upheld affirmative action policies at the University of Michigan. She is a lifelong champion of diversity in academia, and as the first black female tenured in the law schools of both Wayne State and the University of Miami, she has twice become a symbolic embodiment of her efforts.

“Recruitment of the most talented students of color is best when you have faculty of color doing important things that are of interest to those students,” Fenton says. “And unfortunately with the state of society today, when you talk about doing poverty work, you are most often talking about working with women of color. Having a diverse faculty assists in understanding those issues, the rhetoric, and the social status behind all of that.”

Fenton has two works in progress, both of which emphasize the fact that actions outside of the courtroom often help shape law. One project, a collaboration with an English professor at Wayne State, focuses on pamphleteering by pro-Communist organizations in the 1940s and 1950s as “at least part of the political impetus behind some of the changes in civil rights law during that era.” Fenton’s other endeavor focuses on the value of speech in the race context, particularly the evolution of defamation law.

“We’re at a point where people look at the law and say, ‘You’ve got the 14th Amendment. We took care of that,’” Fenton says, noting that achieving true racial equality requires digging deeper to address society’s attitudes and perceptions. “Law is about the messages of equality as much as it is about whether or not I am entitled to sit at the front of the bus.”

—Meredith Danton