Adjoa A. Aiyetoro, associate professor of the UALR William H. Bowen School of Law, has been selected as the first director of the UALR Institute on Race and Ethnicity. Aiyetoro, who was selected following a national search, will assume the position July 1.
She has displayed a passion for racial justice throughout a career as a social worker, lawyer in the U. S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, director of administration at the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation’s National Prison Project, and executive director of the National Conference of Black Lawyers. At UALR, she is a member of the Chancellor’s Committee on Race and Ethnicity and the Faculty Senate.
Born in St. Louis, Mo., Aiyetoro participated in demonstrations during her undergraduate years at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., working to promote the hiring and promotion of black employees in local corporations. She went to the Washington University George Warren Brown School of Social Work in St. Louis as a graduate student and began a career as a social worker. There, she worked to desegregate the maternity ward at the Barnes Hospital, where Medicaid patients – most of them black – were relegated to the second floor, where black women had been isolated during segregation.
