User:Vdolphinv/sandbox

Comment
 * I understand why you got the comment above. I can help out if you like - doing one kind of thing at a time.
 * First, use the template and parameters for this infobox Template:Infobox academic for the block of items between About to Early life and education. There should just be one link to another website - the main one used for this person.
 * Next thing after that is to format citations. See Help:Reftags. There the basic citation and then a short hand method for second or more uses of the same source
 * Then, we can take it from there, such as:
 * Sorting out reliable sources
 * Editing for brevity and encyclopedic content for WP:BLP, Biographies of living persons.
 * I am guessing from the information in the draft that there is a close connection to the subject of the article. Please read this information - including how to disclose a close connection.
 * If you'd like my help working with this article, after you get the infobox done, I will set up your first reference (aka citation). You can answer here, I will "watch" this page.–CaroleHenson (talk) 23:29, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Added COI link.–CaroleHenson (talk) 23:48, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

Option An option to relatively quickly and easily get an article started is to 1) find reliable sources for the content in the introductory paragraph and the information in the infobox, 2) add the infobox, and 3) add the list of publications. It's a really good introduction and that makes it doable to get an article started.

From what I can tell, she warrants an article for all the good works that she has done and this is how I would start.–CaroleHenson (talk) 03:32, 14 April 2024 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the clean-up you've done on this draft. There's enough momentum that I will move forward with this abbreviated option, using sources from the Find sources links on the talk page. That will solve the COI issue for now, too. I will start it as an abbreviated article Dawn D. Bennett-Alexander now. The link should turn blue in the next two hours.


 * I don't know how many "firsts" I am going to find, etc. - so the wording will change based upon what I find in sources. I am guessing I will come across some articles or books that mention that she has done ground-breaking work - or something like that. And, too many "firsts" sound more like a puff-piece than an encyclopedia article, in my opinion. I am very open to comments.–CaroleHenson (talk) 16:47, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

Dawn D. Bennett-Alexander (born 1951) is a lawyer, academic, author and consultant who created the first course in Employment Law addressing workplace discrimination for colleges of business and provided a good deal of the foundation for what is now known as the concept of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging (DEIB). In 1982, she created, developed and taught the first Employment Law course for colleges of business based on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that later became an academic discipline. In 1991 she was first to use the word “Diversity” as a new paradigm for looking prophylactically at workplace discrimination-related issues. In 1992 she co-authored the Employment Law section of the Academy of Legal Studies in Business. She was elected as the first Black president of the Southeastern Academy of Legal Studies in Business and co-authored the first Employment Law textbook for colleges of business, now in its eleventh edition;. In 2011 she co-authored the first Legal Environment of Business textbook to totally incorporate DEIB and went on to serve on the US task force that created the new international standard for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging issued in 2021 (ISO 30415:21), followed by creating the first online certification program for that standard. In 2022, Bennett-Alexander began teaching in the National Judicial College’s first-ever four-day Anti-Racist Courtroom course and became a member of its faculty. She is the first and only African American female professor tenured in the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business and the University of North Florida’s College of Business.

Early life and education
Bennett-Alexander was born in Washington, DC on January 2, 1951, to Ann Pearl Frances Bennett (neé Liles), a housewife, and Rev. William Henry Bennett, Sr., a Virginia Union University graduate and clerk at the National Bureau of Standards and Harry Diamond Laboratories and Baptist minister and pastor. As a twelve-year-old, with her family she attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, and heard Dr. King’s “Dream” speech. In her senior year of high school, several students at her high school formed a new organization called the Modern Strivers, to push for use of the new term “Black” rather than “Negro” as a term referring to African Americans, advocacy of the emerging concept of “Black Power,” courses in African American history, and other race-based issues. The organization received national attention after being included in a Time magazine article as part of a newly emerging movement in the country. In 1968, at age seventeen, Bennett-Alexander graduated from Eastern Senior High School where she had been active in the Student Council, Drama Club, Spanish Club and other activities, including exchange programs.

After graduating from high she attended Defiance College in Defiance, Ohio, a small, predominantly white institution affiliated with the United Church of Christ that was seeking Black students in the wake of the recent civil rights gains taking place in the country. In 1970, she transferred back home to Washington, DC to the new, predominantly Black, Federal City College (now the University of the District of Columbia). She graduated  magna cum laude in the inaugural class of Federal City College with her Bachelor of Science in Sociology and a minor in Political Science.

She went on to attend the Howard University School of Law, serving as lead articles editor on law review. In the summer of 1973 after her first year of law school, Bennett-Alexander worked for the DC Bar Association. In the summer of 1974 after her second year in law school, Bennett-Alexander worked as a law clerk for the attorney general of Oregon in Salem, Oregon, working on legal memoranda and appeals and as a certified law student argued the case of State v. Burr before the Court of Appeals of Oregon, which she won. She graduated from law school cum laude in 1975.

Career
Bennett-Alexander received several offers of employment after graduating from law school, but chose to accept a position in the Honors Program at the US Department of Justice (DOJ) in the Criminal Appeals Division. However, one of her law school professors recommended her for a position as law clerk to the first African American female appointed under DC’s new Home Rule Act of 1973 to the highest court in DC, the DC Court of Appeals. The Honorable Julia Cooper Mack was the first African American female appointed to a court of last resort in the US. Although the timing of Judge Mack’s appointment meant that she was out of the normal cycle of hiring law clerks and Bennett-Alexander had already accepted a position and begun to work for the Department of Justice, Judge Mack  extended an offer to Bennett-Alexander and Bennett-Alexander accepted. Because the newly appointed judge had worked in the same unit in the Department of Justice and was well known and respected, the DOJ released Bennett-Alexander to work for Judge Mack despite Bennett-Alexander’s commitment to the DOJ. This meant that Bennett-Alexander left DOJ to clerk at the highest court in DC just three weeks after beginning her job at DOJ. Judicial clerkships are normally a year-long position, but Bennett-Alexander clerked for Judge Mack for only six months, from September 1976 to March 1977, because of the recommendation of yet another of her former law professors.

After the resignation of President Richard Nixon in the wake of the Watergate scandal, at the recommendation of another law school professor, and with the blessing of Judge Mack, Bennett-Alexander went to work at the White House in the administration of President Gerald R. Ford, at the White House Domestic Council headed by James Cannon, as Assistant to the Associate Director and Counsel, Richard (Dick) Parsons. Among other issues, she worked on those involving gender, race, gun control, illegal drugs, immigration, the Equal Opportunity Coordinating Council, and consumer protection. Bennett-Alexander left the White House at the end of the Ford administration after the 1976 election of Jimmy Carter as the next president of the US.

Bennett-Alexander went on to work in the US Federal Trade Commission’sAntitrust Division from October 1977 to December 1978, taught in the Antioch School of Law (now the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clark School of Law)  National Farmworker Paralegal Training Program, a grant contract program, from October 1979 to January 1981 and litigated federal sector labor law appellate cases in the Solicitor’s Office of the Federal Labor Relations Authority(FLRA) from January 1981 to May 1982.

While at the FLRA, Leon Applewhaite, one of the three Authority member heading the agency, asked Bennett-Alexander if she would allow him to submit her resumé for consideration to create and develop a new course for his old boss, Robert Helsby, who had served as the first chair of the New York Public Employee Relations Board (NY PERB) but had now retired to Florida and was teaching in the college of business at the University of North Florida (UNF). Helsby wanted someone to create and develop a course to address a phenomenon he had witnessed many times over as head of NY PERB. Helsby had witnessed unfair labor practice claims brought by employees being totally ignored if they involved race or gender issues. Because it was the head of the agency asking, Bennett-Alexander reluctantly agreed to allow her resumé to be considered, even though she had little interest in teaching or moving south. Her resumé was chosen by UNF, she interviewed and was offered the job. She accepted the position and moved to Florida in June of 1982. The course, which they named Employment Law, became one of the most popular courses in the college and spawned UNF Continuing Education’s one-day Employment Law seminar, which became one of their most popular offerings as it gained in prominence. The seminar, developed by Bennett-Alexander merely as a way to supplement her income the first summer after going into academia when she realize she would not be teaching and thus not paid in the summers, was the beginning of her impactful consulting work and the basis for her unique approach to teaching about workplace discrimination issues and what would develop into DEIB. Bennett-Alexander was the first Black professor to receive tenure in UNF’s College of Business.

Five and one-half years after coming to UNF, the University of Georgia sought out Bennett-Alexander to join the faculty of their college of business, which she did in January of 1988. She was the first affirmative action hire of the plan put in place by UGA’S new president, Charles B. Knapp, as he tried to address the dearth of Black faculty at the flagship institution of the state and the first chartered public university in the U.S. As had been the case at the UNF, she became the first African American, and only, female in a tenure-track position in the college of business and once again earned tenure in 1994, the same year the first edition of her textbook, Employment Law for Business, with co-author Laura Pincus Hartman, was published by McGraw-Hill’s forerunner, Irwin Publishing. It was the first textbook for colleges of business that addressed employment discrimination and before it was even published, became the industry leader, where it remains thirty years later, through ten editions. While publishers had rejected the textbook several times because there was no market for it since they knew of no other such courses being taught, immediately after the Hill-Thomas hearings,publishers saw the need for the textbook and Bennett-Alexander and Hartman had competing offers to publish the text. They chose the publisher that understood the market would need time to build and promised to publish a second edition even if the first did not sell well. The contracts were signed in 1991 and the textbook was published in 1994. Even before publication the textbook became an immediate success and won an industry award for outstripping all projections.

As a result of the Employment Law textbook, attention was brought to workplace discrimination issues and the subject of Employment Law and later the area of DEIB became part of the AACSB requirements for college of business and its curriculum and courses were taught across the country and world. Bennett-Alexander, along with Hartman, co-founded and co-chaired the Employment and Labor Law Section of the Academy of Legal Studies in Business (ALSB), 1992-1994, and co-edited the section’s newsletter during the same period. The ALSB is the professional organization for lawyers who teach law in colleges of business. Bennett-Alexander and Hartman chose to withdraw from the textbook after thirty years and ten editions.

Twenty years after signing the Employment Law book contract, in 2011, at its urging, Bennett-Alexander published for McGraw-Hill Publishing, the first Legal Ethical & Regulatory Environment of Business textbook that totally incorporated diversity, The Legal, Ethical & Regulatory Environment of Business in a Diverse Society, with co-author linda f. harrison. The Legal Environment of Business is the required law course in colleges of business. The textbook, ahead of its time, lost its acquisitions editor and advocate and thus was not widely adopted, and was therefore only published for one edition.

During her career, Bennett-Alexander published many papers and delivered many professional presentations on workplace discrimination issues including race, gender, sexual harassment, sexual orientation and gender identity, many advocating the basis for what eventually developed into Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging. From 2011-2014, she served on the task force that created the international standard on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging (ISO 30415:21)issued in May of 2021, now adopted across the world, helped launch, and teaches in, the first online certification program for the new international standard through the UGA/InclusionScore collaboration, and, among other things, wrote the first sexual harassment entry for Grolier Encyclopedia. Her TED Talk on Practical Diversity was one of the first on the issue and has been viewed well over 200,000 times. She has taught  thousands of students and conducted training and consulting for thousands of employees in the US and abroad and has spoken all over the world, including Europe, Africa and China. Bennett-Alexander was invited to deliver a presentation on gender at Oxford University in Oxford, UK, and awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholar fellowship to conduct research on gender in the workplace in Ghana, west Africa. She lived in Ghana for ten months with her three daughters while teaching at the Ghana School of Law. She was also invited (and did so) to serve on the Fulbright Selection Committee for Sub-Saharan Africa for three years following the end of her Fulbright fellowship term.

For over four decades Bennett-Alexander has fought against workplace and other discrimination and for DEIB issues in many  ways, from marching in the streets to teaching about them, writing about them in legal textbooks, legal articles, newspaper columns, letters to the editor, letters to legislators and other leaders, consulting with leaders of all kinds about DEIB issues and serving as a constant resource for those in need of insight on the issues. With the $25,000 she received as the recipient of the 2015 Beckman Award for Excellence in Teaching, she established at the University of Georgia the Dawn D. Bennett-Alexander Building Bridges Scholarship for students engaged in DEIB work at the university. Now with twelve recipients, the first is now at Harvard Law School, and one of the latest, a press aide for the Speaker of the House on Capitol Hill. All recipients have engaged in a broad array of DEIB activities.

As a part of her DEIB advocacy, Bennett-Alexander was also a keen observer of history and believes in participating in it so that the presence of marginalized groups, so often not seen in historical photos, is there. She traveled to the 2008 Democratic National Convention, in Denver with no connections or position to “simply to breathe the air” if the first Black person to be nominated for president by a major party could possibly occur. Bennett-Alexander serendipitously obtained two sets of tickets from friends she discovered at the event, one the law professor who had recommended her for the job at the White House thirty-two years before who was at the convention as a close advisor to Hillary Clinton, and the other a former student she had taught Employment Law several years before. Forty-five years to the day after attending the March on Washington as a 12-year-old, Bennett-Alexander was able to watch as Barack Obama, the first African American to be nominated for president of the US by a major political party, gave his speech accepting the nomination in Mile High Stadium. Eight years later in 2016 she attended the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, as part of the Georgia delegation, along with her icon, Georgia’s Rep. John Lewis and was able to cast her vote for Hillary Clinton to be the first female candidate for president to be chosen by a national party.

Upon her retirement after 33 years in February 2021, after amassing over sixty awards for teaching and service, The University of Georgia granted Bennett-Alexander emerita status and honored her lifetime of DEIB work by creating an endowment for the Dawn D. Bennett-Alexander Inclusive Community Award to be presented annually to a faculty member demonstrating a deep commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion both inside and outside of the classroom.

Bennett-Alexander remains active in consulting, writing and speaking on DEIB issues. An avid hand quilter, Bennett-Alexander often uses quilts as a metaphor for life in her DEIB work and presentations. In order to reach a broader, non-academic and non-workplace audience, and continuing her unparalleled legacy of offering a unique and new approach to DEIB issues, she has now extended her DEIB work into the cozy mystery genre with publication of the innovative and, as with her trailblazing Employment Law and Legal Environment textbooks, once again, unique, Quilt Journeys Mystery Series co-authored with her niece, Renée T. H. Patterson. At the center of each story is a quilt that acts strangely, presenting a mystery to be solved, that is actually the vehicle for  interesting and informative fiction-based non-fiction about a DEIB issue.

Throughout her work, Bennett-Alexander has dedicated her work to her Ancestors, three daughters and two grandchildren, believing her contributions to be the least she can do to honor the experience of her Ancestors who were enslaved in North Carolina, then were sharecroppers during the violent Reconstruction era and her grandparents and parents who suffered the indignities and humiliation of Jim Crowand to try to make the world a better place for her children and grandchildren who came after her. Her life motto and underlying theme for all of her work is that “It’s ALL about LOVE…” and the work she calls upon others to do in pursuing DEIB is their uniquely individual “heart work.”

Bennett-Alexander’s lifelong quest, and what drives much of her work, has been to try to understand what humanity can do to treat its fellow human beings better, regardless of irrelevant immutable characteristics such as race, gender, sexual orientation, differing abilities or personal choices about things like natural hairstyles or accents. She passionately believes, and in her work strives to make clear, that we are all put here for a purpose and everyone should be allowed to thrive and be included despite irrelevant differences because we all bring unique attributes that make the world a better, more interesting and productive place. Her three main personal concentrations have been to explore US slavery, the Holocaust and the Native American Trail of Tears/Indian Removal. For decades she has explored these areas in many ways in an effort to understand, including teaching a study abroad course on the Holocaust in Prague, Budapest and Krakow, including visiting Holocaust sites and concentration camps, supporting and attending the openings of the Smithsonian’s Holocaust Museum and National Museum of African American History and Culture, visiting and supporting Native American reservations and studying and attending programs on the topics. Ultimately her quest is both to support these groups as well as seeking to understand how average people can be moved to hate and be willing to enslave or annihilate an entire race of people, and to work to counter it in any way she can.

Personal life
Bennett-Alexander has three daughters and two grandchildren. She is an avid hand quilter, knitter, crocheter, reader, writer, wool spinner, beaded jewelry maker, needleworker and gardener. She is also a prize-winning bread baker and lives in Athens, GA.

Publications
Books-Legal

Employment Law for Business 10e (January 2021), 9e (2018), 8e (2014) 7e (2011), 6e(2009), 5e (2007), 4e (2003), 3e (2000), 2e (1998), 1e (1995), McGraw-Hill Publishing Co.. First-of-its-kind Employment Law text (and accompanying instructor's manual) for business students and practitioners. Has been number one in the market since its first edition.

Contemporary Contracts E-text (2018), Great River Learning, publishers. Business Law text concentrating on the legal area of contracts.

The Legal, Ethical and Regulatory Environment of Business in a Diverse Society, McGraw-Hill Publishing, 2011. Invited, first-of-its-kind cutting-edge Legal Environment text that totally infused diversity into the subject matter.

The Legal, Ethical & Regulatory Environment of Business, South-Western Publishing Co.,1996, with accompanying instructor's manual. Text took innovative new approach to teaching Legal Environment by introducing a story thread that ran throughout the text and acted as a focal point for all legal issues discussed.

Encyclopedia of Business Ethics and Society 2e, SAGE Publications, five entries:  Employment Discrimination, Equal Opportunity, National Origin Discrimination, Comparable Worth, and Race Discrimination. May 2018.

Encyclopedia of Business Ethics and Society, 1e, SAGE Publications, entries: Comparable Worth, Employment Discrimination, Equal Opportunity, National Origin Discrimination, and Race Discrimination. November 2007.

Perspectives in Business Ethics, Laura Pincus Hartman, ed., chapter on affirmative action, McGraw-Hill, Pubs. February 2004-present.

Federal Employment Rights, (Editor) National Employee Rights Institute, 1999.

Grolier Encyclopedia Yearbook  1998, first-ever Sexual Harassment entry, 1999.

Books Chapters-Non-Fiction

Children of the Dream: Growing Up Black in America, (chapter), Pocket Books/Simon Schuster, 1999.

Lesbians in Academia, (chapter), Routledge Press, 1997.

Life Notes: Contemporary Writings of Black Women, (two chapters) Norton Press, 1994.

Books-Fiction

The Wandering Quilt-Book 1 of The Quilt Journeys Mystery Series, with Renée T. H. Patterson, IUniverse, Pub., 2022.

Hidden in Plain Sight: Brian’s Quilt–Book 2 of the Quilt Journeys Mystery Series, Quilted Hearts Pub., 2023.

Not All Diamonds are Gems, Not All Stars Are in the Sky: Eden’s Quilt – Book 3 of the Quilt Journeys Mystery Series, Quilted Hearts Pub. 2023.