Martin Luther King, Jr., Convocation

About the Martin Luther King Jr. Convocation

The Martin Luther King, Jr., Convocation, celebrating its 34th year, is an occasion for Loyola and the Baltimore community to launch the spring semester and the New Year by coming together for shared inquiry into the issues of social justice, politics, spirituality, and the legacies of race and racial justice in America.

The convocation is co-sponsored by the Office of the President, Office of Equity and Inclusion, Office of Peace & Justice, the Karson Institute for Race, Peace, & Social Justice, Messina, and the African and African American Studies Program.

Janai Nelson 

Janai Nelson is President and Director-Counsel of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), the nation’s premier civil rights law organization advancing racial justice and equality. Nelson has spent nearly three decades fighting for racial justice as a renowned litigator and prolific legal scholar with specific expertise in election law. 

A renowned scholar of voting rights and election law, Nelson has produced cutting-edge research on election law, race, and democratic theory. Her article “Parsing Partisanship: An Approach to Partisan Gerrymandering and Race” — which appeared in NYU Law Review — explores how the Supreme Court could address hybrid racial and partisan gerrymandering claims. In “Counting Change: Ensuring an Inclusive Census for Communities of Color,” published in the Columbia Law Review, she advocates for representational equality in the census to ensure all U.S. residents are counted and served. Nelson has taught courses on election law, voting rights, constitutional law, and racial equity strategies while also guest lecturing at law schools nationwide. 

In October 2025, Nelson argued Louisiana v. Callais before the United States Supreme Court, defending equitable congressional representation for Black voters in Louisiana and the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Nelson was also one of the lead counsels in Veasey v. Abbott (2018), a successful federal challenge to Texas’s voter ID law, and the lead architect of NUL v. Trump (2020), which sought to declare the Trump administration’s executive order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion training in the workplace unconstitutional before it was rescinded. 

A graduate of NYU and UCLA School of Law, Nelson clerked for U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Theodore McMillian and U.S. District Judge David H. Coar. Nelson regularly speaks as a civil rights, constitutional law, and election law expert in the media, at conferences and symposia nationwide. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights and a Trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. 

The convocation will also be live-streamed via YouTube, and closed captioning will be provided.

Persons with disabilities who may require special services should contact the Office of Disability and Accessibility Services at 410-617-2062 (TDD) or 410-617-2141 at least 48 hours before the event.

For more information, please call 410-617-2082 or write to OfficeOfTheCEIO@loyola.edu