First Black College Dean Marilyn Yarborough

1989

First Black College Dean Marilyn Yarborough

1989

First Black College Dean Marilyn Yarborough

Although Marilyn Yarborough became the first black college dean at UT or any major Southern law school in 1989, the legal profession was not her first career. She worked as an aerospace engineer in the 1960s for IBM and Westinghouse. After earning her law degree from UCLA in 1973, she was one of the early black law professors in the United States holding a tenure track position when she joined the University of Kansas law school faculty in 1976. After leaving UT in 1991, Yarborough held the visiting William J. Maier Jr. Chair of Law at West Virginia University, then became a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law from 1993 until her death in 2004.