Ben Crump becomes first living Black attorney to have school named after him

A Florida university has become the first in the nation to name its law school after a practicing Black attorney. 

The Benjamin L. Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University was renamed in a ceremony earlier this week. 

Crump is a prominent civil rights attorney. Over the years, he has represented families of Black victims who died at the hands of law enforcement, including Trayvon Martin and Breonna Taylor, as well as Ahmaud Arbery. 

He is currently representing the family of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old man who died after a traffic stop turned into a deadly police beating. 

“We have come such a long way in the journey to equality, but we are not there yet,” Crump said in a statement to Reuters.

Out of 199 law schools across the nations the American Bar Association reports that only one other campus is named after a Black lawyer: the Texas Southern University Thurgood Marshall School of Law, named after the first Black U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Marshall died in 1993.

Crump made a $1 million monetary gift to the school to help support the name change, Reuters reported. 

In 2022, nearly 80 percent of St. Thomas’s student body was comprised of students of color. Two-thirds of the student body was Hispanic and 7 percent was Black, according to ABA.

Nationally, non-white law students made up 33 percent of the population in 2022, according to the ABA’s figures. Only 8 percent of law students were Black.