The Equal Justice Society celebrated its 10th anniversary on Dec. 7 with a gala fundraiser at Yoshi’s San Francisco featuring a concert by the Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra with Faye Carol, Kenny Washington and Jeannine Anderson where they performed new songs from “Soul of a Movement: Meditations on Martin Luther King, Jr.”

See photos of the event by Bob Hsiang and listen to some of the music performed that evening.

Co-founded and led today by Eva Paterson, the Equal Justice Society has grown into an established player in the national civil rights community, with a specific law and policy agenda that seeks to reinvigorate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

The gala recognized the individuals and organizations that helped start the Equal Justice Society a decade ago:

Founding donors: Elizabeth Cabraser, Jack Londen, Quinn Delaney and Wayne Jordan, Ford Foundation-Alan Jenkins, Sara Ríos, Open Society Institute-Gara LaMarche, Catherine Samuels, John Kowal and Raquiba LaBrie;

Founding board members: Charles Ogletree, John Bonifaz, James J. Brosnahan, Kate Kendell, Tobias B. Wolff, Eric K. Yamamoto, Maria Blanco and Margaret Russell;

Founders: Eva Paterson, Abim Thomas, Susan Serrano, Carrie Avery, Sheila Thomas, Michelle Alexander, Joan Graff, Margaret Russell, Margalynne Armstrong, Shauna Marshall, Angela Harris, Stephanie Wildman, Cheryl Stevens, April Williams and Norm Spaulding; and

First staff members: Eva Paterson, Susan Serrano, Allegra Churchill, Swati Kapadia, Rico Oyola, Joe Lucero, Archana Sahgal, David Salniker, Keith Kamisugi and Elaine Elinson.

During the summer of 2000, a group of lawyers, professors and other advocates interested in equality and justice met in San Francisco to discuss the formation of an organization that would effectively fight to advance the rights of the under-represented. The new group would take on reactionary jurisprudence and ensure that legal scholarship was used in the service of social justice.

Ten years later, EJS has racked up a sizable list of accomplishments.

EJS helped defeat a series of ballot initiatives designed to outlaw affirmative action and data collection on race and leads a coalition of advocates doing cutting edge affirmative and defensive advocacy in California, an important testing ground for racial justice initiatives in the future.

EJS has also exposed hundreds of lawyers and public policy officials to the social science of unconscious bias, and convened litigators and social scientists to brainstorm new approaches to social equity. It has developed a training curriculum for educators, now being used by dozens of school districts across the country, to address implicit bias in the classroom. EJS has substantively engaged in battles against bigotry against immigrants and LGBT people.

The organization is now ready to start litigating cases that will reclaim the 14th Amendment as a tool for making racial justice a reality.

Thank you to Lisa Wong & Associates for your event management services!

A SPECIAL THANK YOU TO OUR GALA SPONSORS AND ADVERTISERS

• Arnold & Porter LLP
• Minami Tamaki LLP
• Morrison & Foerster LLP
• Neyhart, Anderson, Flynn & Grosboll
• Richard Grosboll
• James Finberg & Melanie Piech
• Colette Holt & Steven Pitts
• Van Der Hout, Brigagliano & Nightingale, LLP
• Thomas A. Saenz
• NARAL Pro-Choice California
• Gwen McKinney
• Doron Weinberg
• David Salniker & Teri Waller
• Rev. Diana McDaniel & the Friends of Port Chicago
• Price And Associates
• Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area
• Cedric Brown & Ray Pifferrer
• Nan Hunter
• Boxer & Gerson, LLP

Ellee Koss, Eva Paterson, Netroots Nation, Keith Kamisugi, Rebecca Prozan, Matt Haney and Dexter Ligot-Gordon invite you to join us for a fun and stimulating evening to welcome to the Bay Area Mike Lux of Progressive Strategies and OpenLeft.com on Sunday, February 15, from 6-8 p.m. at Mercury Lounge, 1582 Folsom Street, San Francisco.

In Nov. 2008, Mike was named to the Obama-Biden Transition Team. In that role, he served as an advisor to the Office of Public Liaison and has helped shape the White House Office of Public Liaison.

On January 14, Mike released his first book, The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be (http://www.theprogressiverevolution.com). Books will be available at the event for purchase and signing.

Event is free, but please RSVP on MyBO, Facebook or through this form. You can also download a PDF flyer of the event here.

ABOUT MIKE LUX

Mike Lux is the co-founder and CEO of Progressive Strategies. Mike has launched a number of important projects, including American Family Voices, and the Progressive Donor Network.

Mike was a co-founder of Americans United for Change, Center for Progressive Leadership, Grassroots Democrats, Progressive Majority, Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, and Women’s Voices/Women Vote. He also played a role in helping launch the Center for American Progress and Air America. Mike was Senior Vice President for Political Action at People For the American Way (PFAW), and the PFAW Foundation. He oversaw lobbying and legal advocacy, field operations, state and regional offices, voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts. He helped launch the PFAW PAC and the PFAW Voters Alliance in 1997. He was also responsible for coalition building with other organizations and interest groups.

From January 1993 to mid-1995, Mike served as Special Assistant to President Clinton for Public Liaison in the White House. Prior to his service at the White House, Mike served as Constituency Director on the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign and the presidential transition team. In the 1988 cycle, Mike was a member of the senior staff for the Biden and Simon presidential campaigns. In the 1984 cycle, he played a major volunteer role in the Iowa Mondale campaign.

In July of 2007, Mike launched OpenLeft.com with bloggers Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers. OpenLeft.com is a news, analysis and action website dedicated to building a progressive governing majority in America.

A Black man born in Hawai’i with an Asian sister was sworn into office Tuesday as our President. He took the oath of office on the same bible used by Abraham Lincoln for the exact same oath 148 years ago, realizing the dreams of countless African Americans and others who previously never imagined this moment.

President Barack Obama now leads our country into uncertain and troubled times. But he begins work on our nation’s ills with unprecedented numbers of Asian Americans in substantive roles in this Administration.

Japanese American Peter Rouse is White House Senior Adviser. Chinese American Chris Lu is Cabinet Secretary. Former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki is Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Nobel prize winner Steven Chu is Secretary of Energy.

We now have a First Family that includes Asian Americans. The President’s sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, is half Indonesian. Her husband Konrad is Chinese American. Their daughter Suhaila is hapa.

This roster of Asian names is significant because the halls and backrooms of power in our nation’s capitol have for too long been dominated by monochromatic men. It does not mean we have arrived. It means we’ve only just begun.

For many of us, the most urgent unresolved Asian American and Pacific Islander issues are not always those that touch our everyday lives, but our desire to resolve those issues reflects our belief that an injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere. We must reach outside of our individual realities to understand the plight and tragedy that prevents millions of Americans, Asian Pacific or not, from realizing their true potential.

Our government’s brutal treatment of undocumented immigrants is not just a Latino issue. When Sin Yen Ling and the Asian Law Caucus work to recruit more attorneys to represent victims of raids against immigrants in homes and workplaces and when Sophya Chum and Khmer Girls in Action fight against the unfair deportation of Cambodian youth, we see that immigrant rights is as much our battle.

Attempts to legalize discrimination against gays and lesbians through constitutional amendments to ban marriage are not just LGBT issues. When Amos Lim, Tawal Panyacosit, Jr. and Chinese for Affirmative Action work tirelessly in Asian American communities to replace biogtry with understanding and tolerance, we see that marriage equality must also be our goal.

An article titled “Why I Hate Blacks” – filled with blatant racism and ugly stereotypes published in a prominent Asian American newspaper was not just an African American issue. When David Chiu, now president of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, attorney Dale Minami and other Asian American leaders worked immediately to have AsianWeek apologize for the column and fire the writer and the editor responsible, we saw that the elimination of racism against Blacks and all people of color must be our dream.

All of these issues and more must be part of contemplating our renewed America with Barack Obama as our President. He cannot fight injustice alone. Let’s stand with him.