"I think I have an antenna about issues of inequality— those are the things I get passionate about," said Sheryll Cashin, chair of the academic programs committee on Vanderbilt's Board of Trust.

Cashin, asked to serve on the board by former Chancellor Gordon Gee in 2002, is a Georgetown law professor who frequently writes about race relations, government and inequality in America. She has also served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and to Judge Abner Mikva.

Cashin said she brings a younger and more diverse perspective to the board.

"My hope was that being a little younger than the average age of the board members and coming from a different perspective, as a faculty member who deals with young students, and being a woman and a racial minority, that I would offer some unique perspective," Cashin said.

Cashin was born to politically active parents and raised in Huntsville, Ala. at the height of the struggle for integration in the South, which she said made her aware of social injustice at young age.

"I was arrested at the age of four months when my mother took me to a sit-in," said Cashin. "I gained a social consciousness and an awareness of racial inequality from a very early age."

Cashin's father founded the National Democratic Party of Alabama to fight George Wallace's Dixiecrat party. Coming from a family of civil rights leaders that has spanned four generations (her great-grandfather served as a Republican state legislator during Reconstruction), Cashin has strong convictions about the upcoming election's connection to race relations today.

"Americans have proved skeptics wrong," she said. "Race relations are changing every day before our very eyes ... I remember meeting Barack Obama and he was this shabbily dressed guy from the south side of Chicago. It's weird to actually personally know a president ... To say yes, he's a friend. I never would have imagined that."

Cashin will be giving the 2008-2009 Walter Murray Jr. Commons Lecture on Nov. 6 at 4:10 p.m. in the Wyatt Center Rotunda.