Black History Month: Howard Jenkins, Jr.

In honor of Black History Month, we’d like to highlight the career of Howard Jenkins, Jr., a graduate of the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. Mr. Jenkins was the first African American on the National Labor Relations Board. He served under five presidents and wrote over 40,000 decisions and dissents during his tenure as he pursued his personal mission “to help them discover blacks in the industrial work force, and to get it firmly fixed in our national labor policy that discrimination on the basis of race or sex is an unfair labor practice.”

During his law school years (1938 – 1941) the law school was housed downtown over Mapelli’s Meat Market. It stayed in that location from 1926-1941. One of Jenkins' favorite law professors was Thompson Marsh, father to current professor Lucy Marsh, who taught at DU for 60 years.

Mr. Jenkins worked as a lawyer in Denver for several years before becoming a faculty member at Howard University Law School. He was appointed to several other government positions before beginning work on the NLRB. For more details on Mr. Jenkins career, please see the biography exhibit on our special collections page. The Penrose Library has a collection of his correspondence, papers, articles and speeches in their archives. Howard Jenkins died at the age of 87 on June 3, 2003 [obituary].

Historical photos about faculty, locations, students and special events related to the Sturm College of Law and the book Lawyers From Denver are just a sampling of items that can be found on our digital history website, created and maintained by the Westminster Law Library.