Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is an Emmy Award–winning writer, playwright, and Professor of Constitutional Law at John Jay College (CUNY), where she created a course on literature, race, and law. She has served as a Resident Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics and as a Visiting Professor at Harvard Kennedy School. Prior to academia, Browne-Marshall litigated social justice and civil rights cases nationally while writing her first book. She is a Pulitzer Center grant recipient.
Her seventh book, A Protest History of the United States (Beacon Press), examines the nation’s 500-year journey from Indigenous resistance and slave uprisings to protests for civil rights, labor rights, women’s rights, climate justice, and anti-war movements. She has led and participated in voting rights, anti-war, and social justice protests and has spoken internationally on issues of racial and gender justice.
Her other books include The Voting Rights War; She Took Justice: The Black Woman, Law, and Power, which received the Phillis Wheatley Book Award; and Race, Law, and American Society. Browne-Marshall received the ABA’s Silver Gavel Award for her animated series Your Democracy, which has nearly 500,000 views and international film awards. Her podcast is Law of the Land.
She has appeared in and provided expert commentary for documentary films including Let the World See (ABC), Becoming Frederick Douglass (PBS), and Harriet Tubman: Visions of Freedom (PBS). Her research travel to Angola resulted in the award-winning documentary Before 1619: She Took Justice, about Queen Nzingha’s 17th-century battle to stop the slave trade. She has provided legal commentary for CNN, MSNBC, France24, BBC, NPR, NY1, and other outlets. Browne-Marshall is a member of PEN International’s Writers Circle and is currently working on a novel. She lives in New York City.