Margaret Burnham


Margaret Burnham is a professor at Northeastern University School of Law and the founder of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project there.

Career

Burnham's legal practice included serving as an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
In 1970, Burnham worked with CPUSA lawyer John Abt to defend Angela Davis and later wrote the foreword to Abt's memoir.
In 1977, she became the first African American woman Judge in Massachusetts, serving in as an Associate Justice of the Boston Municipal Court until 1982.
In 2008, she was one of the lawyers in a landmark federal lawsuit against Franklin County, Mississippi for their law-enforcement agents' involvement in the 1964 Ku Klux Klan kidnapping, torture and killing of two 19-year-olds, Henry Dee and Charles Eddie Moore.