The Classroom From the Archives 70 Y E ARS AGO
Jean Camper Cahn ’52 BY DEANNA FOX
Jean Camper Cahn ’52 came to Emma Willard School from Baltimore with a sense of equity, service, and courage already embedded deep in her being. Her father was a physician and a social activist, and her mother was a hairdresser. Her childhood home was a meeting place for local NAACP chapters; notable activists like Thurgood Marshall and Paul Robeson were regular guests. When she was admitted to Emma Willard School, she was one of the first Black students to attend. Jean fully engaged the Emma experience as an active member in Campus Players, choir, The Clock staff, and the literary board for The Gargoyle. The troubles of Baltimore were never far from her mind, despite her successes at Emma: while a student in the 1950s, the Black population of Baltimore experienced unprecedented eminent domain issues. As many as 90 percent of the 25,000 families displaced for infrastructure projects in Baltimore were Black,
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continuing a long history of racial profiling and redlining. It would be two years after Jean graduated that the historic Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case would declare school segregation unconstitutional, but ideas of equity and inclusion were already stirring within Jean. After graduating from Emma, Jean enrolled in Northwestern University before transferring to Swarthmore, where she would meet her future husband, Edgar S. Cahn. Jean and Edgar married in 1957, a notable union both for their combined legal prowess and the fact that they were an interracial couple married a decade before Loving vs. Virginia declared antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional. Jean and Edgar both then went on to attend Yale Law School (she graduated in 1961, two years before her husband, while also bearing children) before they were called to start a legal aid society in New Haven, Connecticut, encouraging the allocation of government funds to protect the constitutional liberties of all citizens. While there, Jean and Edgar established a new course for legal justice for all people in the US. One hallmark achievement in her time in New Haven was overturning the practice of withholding the remains of dead infants until parents could pay their medical bills. This display of prioritizing monetary gain over humanity challenged Jean’s sense of fairness and equity, driving her to redefine legal representation for all people. Jean knew that the only way to create lasting change was to engage with existing legal structures and act as a catalyst for transformation. With Edgar, she wrote extensively for the Yale Law Review on the need for government funding for legal societies, pro bono consultation, and representation of the traditionally underserved. For Jean, lifting people out of poverty could occur through stringent legal advocacy and litigation, coupled with the community organization her father had introduced her to before her days as an Emma student. By 1965, Jean had opened her own law office in Washington, DC, specializing in corporate law and consulting on legal services for impoverished people.