Protecting the 14th Amendment
By Eva Paterson
Huffington Post

For almost 150 years, the 14th Amendment has been the backbone of civil rights law in America. Its protection of individual rights for all — from freed slaves to immigrants to workers fighting against race discrimination — has made this amendment an honorary member of the Bill of Rights.

No wonder it is under attack.

In recent months, Republican Senators and state legislators have sought the public spotlight by calling for an end to the amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to those born on U.S. soil. If a child’s parents are not documented, they shout, that child should not be allowed to be a citizen. If they had their way, they would roll back a U.S. Supreme Court decision, U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, decided more than a century ago.

If this is what the enemies of the 14th Amendment are doing in the spotlight, imagine what they are doing behind the scenes to eviscerate the measure. Those who want to turn the clock back on civil rights also are trying to undo the Amendment’s Equal Protection clause, making it virtually impossible for victims of discrimination to find justice in our courts. Read more.

EJS has long wanted to engage in the next level of overturning the Intent Doctrine. Finding just the right Director of Law and Policy was critical to achieving this goal. And Reggie is the perfect fit.

Reggie is currently a senior staff counsel in the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation’s Racial Justice Program. An attorney with the ACLU since 1995, he helped pioneer legal challenges to racial profiling practices nationwide and is the ACLU’s chief litigator in challenges to racial profiling, leading national litigation efforts and consulting with ACLU state affiliates and others in cases of “driving while black or brown,” airport profiling, and profiling related to the war on terror.

Shuford’s advocacy to promote affirmative action includes leading recent efforts in Missouri and Oklahoma to defeat anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives, similar to California’s Prop. 209. Those initiatives were also sponsored by Ward Connerly and his supporters.

His docket has also included cases involving educational adequacy and equity, the school to prison pipeline, and the right to counsel for indigents. He also has been involved in advocacy against racism in the use of the death penalty.

Since September 11, 2001, working with colleagues around the country, he has filed a half dozen landmark lawsuits against major airlines alleging racial discrimination, as well as a nationwide challenge to the Transportation Security Administration’s management of the No-Fly List.

He has authored numerous petitions and briefs for cases that were presented to the U.S. Supreme Court dealing with matters of discrimination, the Equal Protection Clause and First and Fourth Amendment rights. He has published articles related to racial profiling, affirmative action, and violence in the African American community.

Reggie also teaches and speaks regularly around the country and internationally, including Moscow, Geneva, and Canada, on issues of racial justice, profiling, discrimination, national security, and other topics, and has appeared on numerous television programs, including CNN’s Burden of Proof and Talk Back Live, ABC’s 20/20, Court TV’s Pros and Cons and Crier Today, NBC’s Nightly News and Dateline, an MTV documentary, True Life: I Am Driving While Black, and was featured in Leading the Way: The History of Black Lawyers and Judges in America Throughout the Twentieth Century, on Court TV.

He has been interviewed on various radio and TV programs, including National Public Radio and MSNBC, and has been quoted in major newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today and the Guardian. In addition to his litigation responsibilities, Shuford is the ACLU’s Recruitment and Retention Officer for attorneys of color on the national legal staff.

Prior to the ACLU, Reggie worked in private practice in Raleigh, N.C., with the firm Richard Schwartz & Associates, specializing in education law. Just after graduating law school, he clerked with the Hon. Henry E. Frye of the Supreme Court of North Carolina. He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina School of Law, in Chapel Hill, where he was his graduating class president. He is a Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow at Harvard Law School for the 2009-10 academic year and the recent recipient of the University of North Carolina School of Law’s Distinguished Alumnus Award.

We’re elated that Reggie’s joining the EJS team and hope that you have a chance to meet him (or see him again) after he joins us in mid-May.

On Tuesday, May 26, President Barack Obama announced his historic nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. On the same morning, the California Supreme Court ruled against marriage equality by upholding Prop. 8. The following day brought news that a preeminent scholar on our nation’s diversity, UC Berkeley professor Ronald Takaki, passed away.

SUPREME COURT NOMINEE JUDGE SONIA SOTOMAYOR

In nominating Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, President Obama fulfilled a promise to the American people to appoint judges who are well-qualified, grounded in the rule of law and the Constitution, fair-minded and committed to equal justice for all. Judge Sotomayor embodies all these traits.

In the course of a life that began in a housing project in the South Bronx and brought her to the pinnacle of her profession, Judge Sotomayor accumulated more experience on the federal bench than any incoming Supreme Court Justice in the past 100 years, touching nearly every aspect of our legal system.

But Judge Sotomayor’s ethnicity has proven too much of a temptation for the voices of hate and extremism, who instead of looking at her judicial record have launched a vocal rampage that has reached new heights of absurdity, including calling her a “reverse racist” and calling the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) “the Latino KKK without the hoods and nooses.”

Condemn these unacceptable attacks on Latinos and Judge Sotomayor now. Join NLCR and send a message to Chairman Michael Steele of the RNC, House Minority Leader John Boehner, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell asking them to denounce these statements and restore the nomination process for Judge Sotomayor to a more appropriate and civil discourse.

EJS has also launched a blog and Facebook page in support for Judge Sotomayor. Visit http://ConfirmSotomayor.org and join the Facebook page as a fan. The blog includes a page with information on how you can support Judge Sotomayor.

And if you’re in California, please support our Californians for Fair and Independent Judges coalition so that organizations and individuals here can work together to support Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation. Email Keith Kamisugi at kkamisugi@equaljusticesociety.org for information about joining the coalition.

CALIFORNIA SUPREME COURT RULING ON PROP. 8

The California Supreme Court last Tuesday in a 6-1 vote upheld Prop. 8, the ballot measure discriminating against marriage by same-sex couples.

EJS is relieved the Court protected couples who married before November 5. The presence of thousands of married same-sex couples across California will show that marriage strengthens families and communities and threatens no one.

But by upholding Prop 8, the Court has diminished its legacy as a champion of equality. No minority group should have to defend its right to equality at the ballot. The Court’s decision jeopardizes every minority group in California.

As a racial justice organization, the Equal Justice Society opposes Prop. 8 – not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also because EJS strongly believes in working with others to ensure that the rights of all are expanded, rather than diminished, in our society.

We cannot just pigeonhole Prop. 8 as a ‘gay’ issue. By rolling back the fundamental rights of one group, the Supreme Court’s decision on Prop. 8 casts a threat that now looms over the civil rights of all.

Since the vote on Prop 8, there has been a tidal wave of momentum in favor of full equality. Five states now embrace marriage equality for same-sex couples, and several more are on the brink. We believe that California voters will reverse this injustice at the ballot. California has been a leader in standing up for equality, and it will be again.

Banning same-sex couples from marriage is unfair. Same-sex couples have the same hopes, dreams and concerns for their families as everyone else. They should be allowed the dignity, recognition, and responsibility that come with marriage, just like everyone else.

The fight is not over. Join our friends at the National Center for Lesbian Rights (led by EJS board member Kate Kendall) to receive updates on next steps in this battle for justice.

PROF. RON TAKAKI PASSES AWAY

Ronald Takaki, professor emeritus of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and a preeminent scholar of U.S. race relations who taught the University of California’s first black history course, died at his home in Berkeley on Tuesday, May 26, at age 70. He had struggled for years with multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune condition that attacks the central nervous system.

During his more than 40 years at UC Berkeley, Takaki established the nation’s first ethnic studies Ph.D. program as well as UC Berkeley’s American Cultures requirement for graduation, and advised President Clinton in 1997 on his major speech on race.

“Ron Takaki elevated and popularized the study of America’s multiracial past and present like no other scholar, and in doing so had an indelible impact on a generation of students and researchers across the nation and world,” said Don Nakanishi, director of and professor at UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center and a longtime friend of Takaki’s.

Takaki’s 1989 book, “Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans,” was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

A descendent of Japanese field workers in Hawai’i, Takaki was acutely attuned to the inequities in Hawai’i's tough and ethnically divided plantation system.

In 1966, he was hired to teach UCLA’s first black history course in the wake of the explosive Watts riots. “I can still remember the smoke rising from Los Angeles and the sound of gunfire – it was a war zone,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in that same interview.

When a student in the black history class asked him which revolutionary tools he could teach them, Takaki replied: “We’re going to study the history of the U.S. as it relates to African Americans. We’re going to strengthen our critical thinking skills and our writing skills. These can be revolutionary tools if we make them so.”

After five years at UCLA, Takaki returned in 1971 to UC Berkeley as the Department of Ethnic Studies’ first full-time teacher. He became wildly popular, filling auditoriums with hundreds of students hungry for perspectives on the struggles of America’s minority groups, and went on to win the campus’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1981.

Takaki is survived by his wife, Carol; his three children, Todd of El Cerrito, Calif., Troy of Los Angeles and Dana of Chester, Conn.; and several grandchildren.

Takaki has donated his research and published papers to the Ethnic Studies Library at UC Berkeley. His family asks that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made in Takaki’s name to the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco. Plans for a campus memorial service are pending.

All of us at the Equal Justice Society mourn Prof. Takaki’s passing and we express our deepest condolences to Ron’s family and friends.

Join a Facebook page launched in tribute to Prof. Takaki.

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