by Ria Maheshwari
Blair Bowie is a voting rights attorney at the Campaign Legal Center (CLC) who is determined to restore voting rights for incarcerated Americans. Bowie works with Restore Your Vote, a program striving to abolish the last remaining Jim Crow law: the disenfranchisement of felons.
Prior to attending law school, Bowie engaged in environmental work where she realized that implementing policy was becoming increasingly difficult due to the influences of money and power in politics. Bowie observed that key Democrat senators and leaders of influential coal providers were rarely available to meet, engage in discourse, and effect any suggested policy changes.
Therefore, Bowie decided to pursue law school. During these three years, Bowie quickly became aware of the incontestable influence of white supremacy in the American legal system and how it was designed to operate with the objective of exacerbating inequality. This served as the catalyst for Bowie to shift from environmental law to work more broadly with human rights law, concentrating in racial justice initiatives. Already having the necessary experience in democracy advocacy, Bowie pursued a fellowship that allowed her an early focus on the state of Alabama and the formation of the Equal Justice Initiative. Thus, Bowie turned her skills toward repair.
The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) became Bowie’s vehicle for enacting this repair. The EJI began as a way to counsel incarcerated individuals and their release from death row. Using the tenets from the EJI for community models, Bowie has facilitated the growth of the EJI through the Peace and Justice Memorial Project. The purpose of this memorial project is to persuade counties to hold themselves accountable for the actions their leaders, thereby allowing the community to memorialize victims of racial terror lynchings. The Prince George’s County Lynching Memorial Project (PGCLMP) is designed as roman temple with each column representing a county in which there has been a lynching. After a county has completed their tasks (conducting meetings, collecting soil, erecting historical markers, etc.), leaders are able to apply to get the column removed. The community then claims the column, taking it away from the memorial to set it in their own county and leaving just a slab behind that commemorates the county. Not only does this project as an accountability measure for counties, but it promotes practices of meaningful reconciliation and educates the public on the history of American enslavement.
“Bowie quickly became aware of the incontestable influence of white supremacy in the American legal system and how it was designed to operate with the objective of exacerbating inequality. This served as the catalyst for Bowie to shift from environmental law to work more broadly with human rights law, concentrating in racial justice initiatives.”
Bowie became involved in this project upon recognizing her ancestors’ involvements in racial terror acts. Among Alabamian newspaper advertisements from the late 19th century used to sell humans, track people who had escaped, and find their family members, Bowie discovered a classified posting from her ancestor W.D. Bowie — a bounty hunter who had posted for an individual looking for an escapee enslaved person. Given this history, Bowie was asked to give testimony at a public hearing in Maryland. Driven by the State Legislative Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Project, hearings were conducted in each county that had a history of racial terror lynching. Bowie was asked to testify for Prince George’s County to determine whether it was possible to identify descendants of those who were aggressed and descendants of perpetrators. Bowie was in the difficult position of inheriting wealth that came from a history of utilizing enslavement. She was aware of how wealthy individuals would have others enforce racial terrorism rather than affecting these acts themselves. This meant that racial terror murders had come locally where Bowie’s family may not have been directly involved, but made the community climate hospitable for race-based aggression.
Now, Bowie is working with her family to foster the uplifting power of education in communities who have been directly harmed by racial terror lynching. White supremacies systematically view education and community uplifting as a threat — one that Bowie wanted to combat. Thus, the Bowie Family is taking reparations to a personal level by accumulating scholarship money for four students attending Bowie State —the oldest historically black college or university (HBCU) in the country, located in Prince George’s County —whose ancestors were harmed by racial terror lynching. Bowie has already established one scholarship and will fund this first scholarship beginning next semester (Fall 2025).