Anna Williams Shavers, Cline Williams Professor of Citizenship Law and associate dean for diversity and inclusion, died on January 22, 2022, at the age of 75. Two of Anna’s friends and colleagues provided reflection remembering Anna.
By Professor Jo Potuto
Anna Williams Shavers was an incredible human being – warm, caring, kind, and generous – who left a long and impressive record of accomplishments. She was a whiz with computers and things mechanical. She held high and important positions in the ABA. She was a dedicated and influential teacher, and she left a legacy of students who called her not only mentor, but friend.
Anna grew up in Arkansas. She attended segregated schools before Brown v. Board of Education, and she was one of the first students to integrate Hall High School in Little Rock. Her experiences with racial animosity and injustice honed her character. Yet she did not dwell on the past or talk about the unfairness and indignities she suffered. Instead, she talked about the progress toward racial justice that had been made and the work still to be done. She was at the forefront in pushing for gender and race equity, and she did not merely talk the talk, but she very clearly walked the walk.
I honor all Anna’s accomplishments, her passion, her body of work and the influence she has had. Of course, I do. But the Anna I cherish is the Anna who was my closest friend. We spent many Thanksgivings together, at the home of Steve and Elizabeth Willborn. Anna always made sweet potato pie – a great sweet potato pie – and one year she did a turkey on a rotisserie spit (which took hours of watching and basting).
Anna and I liked the same things. We enjoyed traveling, and we enjoyed traveling together. We went to professional conferences together. We attended countless movies and theater performances; Nebraska volleyball games; Final Fours and bowl games. We went to museums in every city we visited. We went to spas and high teas. We also had picnics of junk food in hotel rooms. And we did a lot of shopping. Most of all, we laughed together.
Anna and I had the same sense of humor, and we typically had the same reaction to things we saw or heard. We talked about everything, the important, the mundane, even the silly and petty. But we often also communicated without saying a word. Just a look from her, and I’d know what she was thinking. And vice versa.
It was a joy and privilege to be her friend. I miss her terribly. I always will.
By Professor Steve Willborn
(reprinted with permission from Nebraska Law Review)
Anna Williams Shavers began her career at the College of Law in 1989. That year, former Dean, soon-to-become Chancellor Harvey Perlman wrote a tribute to retiring Professor Lawrence Berger in which he said that the prior decades at the College had been the “Larry Berger era.”
I remember being startled by the remark at the time, even though I had always considered (and still consider) Larry to be my father figure on the faculty. But prior eras at the College, if there were such things, would have been named for Deans (the Pound era) or world events (closure of the World War II era)—not faculty members. But now I understand Dean Perlman’s comment because I have lived through another era that could be named for a faculty member. Anna Shavers was the College’s first African American professor, and she shepherded the College, as professor, associate dean, and acting dean, into a new era of awareness and inclusion. She has had the single greatest effect on the culture of the Law College of anyone during my four decades here. It may well be that the “Larry Berger era” was followed immediately by the “Anna Shavers era.”
But before I get to that, some history. Before coming to Nebraska, Anna had lived several varieties of life as a Black female and, in each life, she overcame any disadvantage and thrived. In her first life, she was born into the segregated South, and not just any part of the South, but a location seared into public consciousness as emblematic of the time: Little Rock, Arkansas. She was in seventh grade in 1957 when the 101st Airborne Division escorted the first Black students into Central High School. She was in eighth grade during the “lost year” when the public high schools in Little Rock were closed to avoid integration. (High school football, however, continued; it was the South after all.)
During her sophomore year in 1960–1961, she was one of only four Black students, all young women, at the newly integrated Hall High School. She didn’t end up at Hall High School randomly—the Black students sent into these new worlds were carefully selected to be able to deal with all the challenges, both academic and, especially, social.
That same year, Anna was recognized by EBONY magazine as one of 25 “bright and talented” Black youth in the country. Thus, by the time she was 16 years old, Anna had lived a life as a young Black student in all-Black segregated schools and then a quite different life as one of four Black students selected to integrate a suburban high school with 800 students.
But the variety of lives was just beginning. After that sophomore year at Hall High School, Anna moved to southern California to live with relatives and attend Santa Monica High School, the high school for the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District. This was, shall we say, a distinct experience from elementary and high school in Little Rock. From Santa Monica, she went east (or, maybe I should say, midwest) to attend college at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio. Central State University is a public historically Black university (HBCU). While always open to all races, its historic mission is the education of African American students. As a result, this life was new, too—a mostly Black experience, but outside the South, in a place with real winters. Anna was never to leave winters again.
Anna’s education had two remaining steps, at two of the top universities in the country. After marrying Stanley Shavers, they moved to Madison, Wisconsin. In 1973, Stanley received his Master of Business Administration degree in Finance, and Anna received her Master of Science in Business from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Then they were off to Minneapolis. Stanley began to work for the 3M Company and Anna, after the birth of her daughter, Amber, and a short interlude working for the National Labor Relations Board, attended law school at the University of Minnesota. At Minnesota, she became one of the first Black students to be managing editor of a law review at a top-ranked university. After law school, she worked briefly for a major Minneapolis law firm and then was recruited by the University of Minnesota to found its Immigration Clinic. I’m not sure how many more lives that is, maybe two, or four, or more. But these years were new experiences—immersions into predominantly white institutions at the highest levels of academia.
These were the lives Anna brought to the University of Nebraska when she arrived in 1989. She was 43 years old at the time, older than most new assistant professors. But her many prior lives and her diverse experiences prepared her well for the remarkable career to follow.
The career had many national and international dimensions, but I want to focus on the impact she had on the College of Law. Anna did more than anyone to shepherd the College into the modern era of diversity and inclusion. In broad terms, it was during this time that the Law School’s efforts expanded from recruiting a critical mass of diverse students to the broader mission of creating a welcoming, inclusive and reflective culture on issues of race and gender. Of course, as Anna’s last article demonstrates, both of these currents have been a central part of the College’s mission for decades, but her presence and efforts greatly expanded the College’s diversity offerings and culture. She taught courses in the area, she organized events, she led the effort to write a diversity and inclusion strategic plan, she was the first associate dean for diversity and inclusion, and, most of all, she was guide, mentor and friend to generations of students, especially diverse students. I have no doubt that for those students, and for many of the broader Law School community, the years from 1989 to 2022 will be remembered as the “Anna Shavers era.”
Finally and personally, Anna was a good friend. She always had that Mona Lisa-like smile. But that and much more is gone: her laugh, her insights, her compassion and humanity, the sweet potato pies she always brought to our Thanksgiving dinners. With the rest of the Law School community, I miss her deeply.
God speed, Anna Williams Shavers.