Purpose, Urgency, Vision: Fighting for Civil and Human Rights in These Crucial Times
We’re working to make America as good as its ideals. I plan to be aggressive.
At a Senate oversight hearing in November 2015, then-Senator Jeff Sessions looked down at me from the dais and questioned my civil rights experience, saying that it indicated “an aggressiveness in these areas.” I was leading the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice at the time, but I don’t think he was paying me a compliment. Yet to this day, I wear his words as a badge of honor. Advancing civil rights? That’s been my life’s work. Aggressively? Always.
Earlier this year, Mr. Sessions assumed a new role, and today, I do the same: I am proud to be the new president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
I will be the first woman and the first child of immigrants to lead this venerable organization. I bring with me experience not only from the Justice Department, but also as a former attorney at the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF). And I come to this role more determined than ever to advance the civil and human rights of all people in our country.
In this critical moment, that mission requires a firm purpose, urgency, and an affirmative vision of an America that is inclusive, fair, and just.
Purpose
At 26, I was fresh out of law school and working for LDF in a small town called Tulia, Texas. A police officer had given false testimony that subsequently sent dozens of African-American men and women to prison on low-level drug charges. Their sentences ranged from 20 years to an astonishing 361 years.
I drove for hours on flat Texas highways, going from prison to prison to visit my clients. Over the next two years, I worked with pro-bono lawyers from top law firms to build a solid case. I was terrified of missing court deadlines that would prevent my clients from seeing justice. But I was buoyed by my clients’ families, who showed incredible courage in the face of daunting odds. It paid off. In 2003, Governor Rick Perry pardoned my clients, setting them free.
It was a great victory, but I learned litigation has limits. Winning a few cases would not reverse the cruel trajectory of mass incarceration in our country. That trend could only be overcome with a sustained movement.
Later at the ACLU, I was again fighting the same brand of injustice, this time on behalf of immigrant children in Texas. These kids had sought asylum in the United States; instead, they were locked up in a for-profit prison, detained in inhumane conditions. I pushed the organization to marshal its resources to help end the scourge of unfair criminal justice policies and build up the sustained movement we needed.
Then, in 2014, just weeks after a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, President Obama asked me to lead the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice. It was a tense time in police-community relations. But people were also waking up to the need to transform our criminal justice system and confront longstanding racial injustice.
We seized on that moment to drive change. In the Civil Rights Division, we advanced substantive criminal justice reform and made progress on constitutional policing, confronting systemic police misconduct in places like Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago. We prosecuted hate crimes and human trafficking. We led enforcement on voting rights, LGBTQ rights, and rights for people with disabilities. And we did it, dare I say, aggressively.
Building a movement to advance civil rights has been my purpose because I want to live — and raise my children — in an America that lives up to its ideals as an inclusive, fair, and just country for all people.
Urgency
Today, our fight is ever-more urgent. Every day, we face a new assault on civil rights. President Trump has sought repeatedly to discriminate against people based on their religion with his “Muslim ban.” A new ”election integrity” commission could lay the groundwork for massive voter suppression. The U.S. Justice Department is rolling back voting rights and LGBTQ rights and retreating from its police reform mandate. It is advancing outdated sentencing policies that people on the right and left have discredited and that hurt communities of color. Trump’s administration has tried to demonize immigrants and agency appointees are eroding their civil rights enforcement work across the board. These irresponsible actions incite fear, stoke hatred, and threaten the civil rights of every person in our country.
Our values, our Constitution, our democracy — they do not protect themselves. Our progress has been a result of people pushing — sometimes inside government but many times outside — toward our ideals. That’s the kind of larger movement we must continue building right now.
Vision
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights was created for moments like this. Founded in 1950, the Leadership Conference began as the legislative arm of the civil rights movement and has coordinated the lobbying efforts on every major federal civil rights law since the 1957 Civil Rights Act.
Today, it is the largest, most diverse national coalition of more than 200 civil rights, faith, and labor organizations working to make America as good as its ideals for all communities. At its core, it is committed to building solidarity around justice, inclusion, and opportunity for all people.
And in the days, weeks, and many months ahead, that is what we must all do. We must embrace solidarity and demonstrate our collective power to fight for justice and fairness.
Resistance is important, but it’s not sufficient. While we must fight back hard, we can’t just play defense and expect to win on civil rights. We must be part of a vibrant movement that builds and deploys our collective power to push for the dignity and fair treatment of everyone in this country. Everything is at stake.
Closing the gap between this country’s lofty ideals and peoples’ actual lived experiences is never easy. Ours will always be a march uphill. But in coalition there is strength, and together, we will take our shared purpose, our urgent call to action, and a bold vision to continue moving forward for an inclusive, fair, and just America for all people.
And I plan to be as aggressive as ever.








