The Bowen Law School Pathway Program was recently awarded the American Bar Association (ABA) 2024 Alexander Award for Excellence in Pipeline Diversity.

The Alexander Award, named after the life and legacy of two legal trailblazers, Raymond Pace Alexander and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, was created to honor an individual or organization that has demonstrated exemplary leadership and success in building educational pipelines to law school and the legal profession for underrepresented students.

“We are honored to receive the ABA’s Alexander Award for Excellence in Pipeline Diversity,” says andré cummings, Associate Dean for Faculty Development and co-founder of the Bowen Law School Center for Racial Justice and Criminal Justice Reform. “Our pathway program works diligently to ensure that underrepresented Arkansas communities and those that have been historically discriminated against have opportunities that they may not otherwise.”

Through the pathway program students receive expert Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) instruction, experience mock classes, and are offered an opportunity to visit the school, meet the dean, and learn more about the admissions process. Since its inception in 2019, the Bowen Law School Pathway Program has engaged more than 100 students, many of whom have enrolled at Bowen and other law schools throughout the country.

The award was accepted earlier this month by Associate Dean cummings and a former pathway program participant and current first-year law student, Lubna Yunus, at the annual ABA mid-year meeting in Louisville, Kentucky.

“I will never forget meeting Dean cummings for the first time,” Yunus says. “It was the best thing that could have ever happened to me in terms of pursuing my dreams of becoming a lawyer. Today, I am a first-year law student at Bowen, and every day I look forward to the day I will take the bar exam and become a very strong advocate for victims of domestic violence and children with special needs.”

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Dean cummings, alongside Judge Amy Dunn Johnson, Professor Todd Clark and Assistant AG Caleb Conrad, have published the next edition of their series of articles focusing on childhood trauma, particularly Adverse Childhood Experiences. This Cincinnati Law Review article examines trauma imposed upon minority children by the Criminal Justice System.

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Dean cummings spoke at Roger Williams University Law in Bristol, RI at the “Hip Hop & the Law” conference. cummings focused his remarks on the ways that law has harmed hip hop artists and artists of color through intellectual property court decisions inhibiting sampling and using modern copyright law as a tool against black artistic creativity.

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Professor Anastasia Boles and Dean andré cummings spoke at Emory Law School on March 30, 2022 to a class on Leadership for Lawyers. Boles and cummings discussed the leadership opportunities that have come to them over the course of their careers focusing on their newly established Center for Racial Justice and Criminal Justice Reform at Bowen Law.

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Dean andré cummings, joined by co-authors Judge Amy Dunn Johnson (Bowen class of 2002), Professor Todd Clark and Assistant AG Caleb Conrad (Bowen class of 2020), presented on their research and forthcoming article entitled “Trauma Informed Policing: How Adverse Childhood Experiences Impact Black and Brown Police Officers” at Case Western Law School

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Dean cummings, together with Bowen third-year law student Kalvin Graham, published their article “Racial Capitalism and Race Massacres” in the Tulsa L. Rev., remembering the Race Massacres in Greenwood, OK and Elaine, AR, 100 years ago. Within, Graham and cummings discuss the historical “tradition” of angry white mobs destroying successful black enclaves in the 20th century

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cummings, andré douglas pond. Trauma. . Ed: Gregory S. Parks and Frank Rudy Cooper. Leave blank, first edition ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (2022). 127-148

Dean cummings contributed his chapter “Trauma” to the book “Fight the Power: Law and Policy through Hip-Hop Songs.” In “Trauma” cummings describes Meek Mill’s autobiographical song of the same name, which describes all of the Adverse Childhood Experiences felt by Mill as a child, including being falsely arrested and imprisoned by Philadelphia PD.

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Dean cummings spoke at the book launch of Fight the Power: Law and Policy through Hip-Hop Songs focusing on his chapter contribution “Trauma.” In his talk, cummings described Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) as traumas that harm children in their youth leading to debilitating adult health outcomes, as experienced by Meek Mill through Trauma.

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Dean cummings and Bowen graduate Caleb Conrad spoke at the Race, Racism and American Media conference on Feb. 25-26, 2022. Conrad and cummings discussed the mainstream white media’s discriminatory coverage of hip hop since its inception in the 1970s and reframed the lens onto hip hop’s revolutionary messages of self-respect to the black community.

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Dean cummings guest lectured at Georgia State University College of Law in Corporate Governance and Public Health discussing his research on Corporate Justice. cummings focused his remarks on the billions of dollars of pledges by Fortune 500 companies to support social justice causes in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020.

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