Date: 2024-12-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00026755
US CAMPUS PROTESTS
A SAD REPLAYS OF PROTESTS PAST!
Jody Armour Looks at USC’s Campus Uprising
A SAD REPLAYS OF PROTESTS PAST!
Jody Armour Looks at USC’s Campus Uprising
Original article: https://www.laprogressive.com/law-and-justice/usc-campus-uprising
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
Peter Burgess
Whenever Jody tells his father’s story, he points to the old manual Royal typewriter prominently displayed in his meeting room.
DICK PRICE AND SHARON KYLE
MAY 7, 2024
No surprise, Jody Armour is playing a key role in the conflagration on the University of Southern California campus—visiting the student encampment, talking with the anti-genocide protesters, acting as their liaison with the school’s leaders, and speaking with the press. So close to the fire is the esteemed USC law professor that the students asked him to be their single faculty ally to attend negotiations with the school’s administrators.
According to Jody, it’s hard to know how those administrators could have handled the protests worse, starting with the cancelation of the valedictorian’s commencement speech by Asna Tabassum, purportedly out of safety concerns, but clearly because having a hijab-wearing, Muslim American speak to her fellow students for the four allotted minutes—no matter how mild she might be—would be more than the school’s fat cat funders could stomach.
Their ham-handedness went downhill from there, culminating with calling in a squadron of the LAPD’s finest to clear the camp and knock the free speech protesters around over the weekend. As a result, Jody and 28 other USC Gould School of Law faculty signed an open letter to USC President Carol Folt and Provost Andrew Guzman. Armour and his fellow faculty members reminded them that the role of the university—any university—is to provide a platform for free speech, protect students, and teach them to be free thinkers.
Over recent months this spring, we have been blessed to audit a criminal law seminar at Jody’s house with a dozen or more of his students, who clearly hold him in the highest regard. A highlight of those Wednesday nights was when Jody would describe the path that has led him to become the Roy P. Crocker Professor of Law at USC.
Key to that was the arrest, trial, and imprisonment of his father when Jody was eight, charged with possessing a bag of marijuana the Akron coppers had clearly planted. His father was sentenced to from 20 to 55 years behind bars.
“His real sin was that he was a barrel-chested 6’8” Black man with a red-haired Irish wife,” Jody says. “Think Lebron James and Lucille Ball walking down the street, arm in arm, in 1950s and 60s Ohio.”
Whenever Jody tells this story—a seminal part of his formation—he points to the old manual Royal typewriter prominently displayed in his meeting room. Without a law degree and no lawyers supporting him, Jody’s father used that typewriter, the warden’s law library, and law books law students would bring him to appeal his case up to Ohio’s supreme court, which granted his arguments and freed him.
Jody couldn’t wait to follow in his father’s footsteps. He currently proudly uses his father’s law case—Armour v. Salisbury—to teach criminal law to a new generation of activist lawyers.
The opinions expressed here are solely the author's and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the LA Progressive.
EDUCATION MIDDLE EAST
BY DICK PRICE Dick Price is Editor of the LA Progressive. With his wife Sharon, he publishes several other print and online newsletters on political and social justice issues. He has worked in publishing as a writer, editor, and publisher for a quarter century. In earlier releases, he was a cab driver, bartender, construction worker, soldier, and farmhand, and for many years helped operate a nonprofit halfway house for homeless alcoholics and addicts.
BY SHARON KYLE Sharon Kyle JD is a former president of the Guild Law School and is the publisher and co-founder of the LA Progressive. For years before immersing herself in the law and social justice, Ms. Kyle was a member of several space flight teams at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory where she managed resources for projects like Magellan, Genesis, and Mars Pathfinder. Sharon also sits on several boards including the Board of Directors of the ACLU and is on the editorial board of the BlackCommentator.com. Opinions are my own. https://linktr.ee/laprogressive
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