CHARLESTON, WV – West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Larry Starcher and Charleston attorney Katherine "Kitty" Dooley will present the first draft of a complete curriculum on the life and legal cases of J.R. Clifford, West Virginia’s first African-American attorney, to Capital High School at 9:30 a.m. Friday, May 23, in the school’s LGI Room. The school is located at 1500 Greenbrier Street in Charleston.

Before the presentation, Justice Starcher and Ms. Dooley will teach students about Mr. Clifford during a 45-minute program in three classes beginning at 7:30 a.m., also in the LGI Room. Each class will include about 100 students, for a total of 300 students. During each class, Justice Starcher and Ms. Dooley will each show brief Power Point presentations and students will act out a portion of a play about Mr. Clifford’s life. Two of the classes will be before the presentation and the third will follow it.

The curriculum that will be presented to the school is for use by students in grades eight, ten, eleven and twelve. It was prepared by the J.R. Clifford Project, which was founded by the West Virginia Supreme Court but is now a separate organization. The lesson plans eventually will be available on the J.R. Clifford Project’s Web site  (http://www.jrclifford.org/index.htm).

The curriculum was written by eight West Virginia teachers, including Teena Gray and Carol Greene from Capital High School. It includes classroom projects, exercises, quizzes, activities, historical documents, and Power Point presentations. The teachers who worked on the curriculum and lesson plans were asked to do so as part of their participation in Project Teach, a separate grant-funded program.

Development of the J.R. Clifford curriculum specifically was funded by grants from the West Virginia Humanities Council, the Appalachian Community Fund and Chesapeake Community Gas.

Mr. Clifford was born in 1848 in Williamsport, in what is now Grant County. He served in the Union Army during the Civil War and then attended Storer College before beginning a career as a teacher and principal. While teaching in Martinsburg he founded the Pioneer Press, West Virginia’s first and longest-running African-American newspaper, and studied law. In 1887 he became the first African-American to pass the West Virginia bar examination. Mr. Clifford also worked with W.E.B. DuBois to found the Niagara Movement.

Mr. Clifford argued two landmark cases before the West Virginia Supreme Court. In 1896, Mr. Clifford filed the first challenge of the state’s segregated school system. In Martin v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that the children of Thomas Martin, an African American father in Morgan County, could not attend a white school, even though the alternative meant they would not receive an education. The decision upheld segregation.

In 1898, Mr. Clifford represented an African American teacher from Tucker County after the county board of education reduced the school term of African-American schools from eight months to five months to save money. The teacher, Carrie Williams, continued teaching for the full eight months. When the board refused to pay her for the additional three months, Mr. Clifford took the case to court. In the Williams v. Board of Education opinion, the Supreme Court held in favor of Ms. Williams. It was the first ruling in the United States to hold that racial discrimination in school terms and teacher pay was illegal.

Mr. Clifford died in Martinsburg in 1933 at the age of 85 and initially was buried there. His body was moved to Arlington National Cemetery in 1954.

Justice Starcher has worked with the West Virginia NAACP, the Mountain State Bar and the J.R. Clifford Project for the past three years to increase West Virginians’ knowledge about Mr. Clifford. His senior Law Clerk, Tom Rodd, wrote a four-act play, "J.R. Clifford and the Carrie Williams Case," that has been performed in Charleston, Bluefield, Morgantown, Harpers Ferry and Huntington.