Staff Report
The president of the N.C. Bar Association will give the commencement address Saturday at Hood Theological Seminary.
Greensboro attorney and Kannapolis native Janet Ward Black will speak to the graduates during a ceremony on the Hood campus on Lutheran Synod Drive.
Black has recently completed two terms as a member of the Hood board of trustees and was named trustee emeritus by her colleagues on the board. She has served continuously since Hood Seminary became an independent entity in 2001.
Hood President Dr. Albert J.D. Aymer praised Black for her leadership on the board and her personal generosity to the Hood Seminary Second Century Capital Campaign.
“She has brought to our board all those things an institution seeks in a trustee: commitment, leadership and stewardship,” Aymer said in a press release.
Black will speak to the graduates about “A City on a Hill.”
The seminary also will confer an honorary doctorate of humane letters on Black and an honorary doctor of divinity degree on the Rev. James David Armstrong, a graduate of Livingstone College who serves as editor and secretary of the A.M.E. Zion Quarterly Review and Historical Society.
Black graduated from Davidson College cum laude in economics in 1982 and received her law degree from Duke University in 1985. She practiced law in Rowan and Cabarrus counties from 1985 until 1992, at which time she was founding partner of a new law firm in Greensboro. She is currently the principal owner of Ward Black Law in Greensboro.
She currently serves as the president of the 14,500-member N.C. Bar Association and has served as president of the North Carolina Academy of Trial Lawyers and as a member of the board of governors of the American Association for Justice.