Renowned changemakers and thought leaders from the ACLU and Equal Justice Society join us in conversation. Eva Paterson (Equal Justice Society) and Anthony Romero (ACLU) join Margaret Russell, SCU’s Associate Provost for Diversity & Inclusion.
This is the second event in a speaker series, SCU Listens & Learns: Race, Reflection, Renewal, which features prominent individuals in conversations about their work and our shared commitment to racial justice.
Join the livestream event: https://youtu.be/wCO7EywoJpc
Margaret Russell will be the interviewer. Afterwards, law students Ardalan Raghian JD ’21, Cassandra Wilkins JD ’22, and Chris Vu JD ’21 will do the Q & A.
Guest speakers:
Eva J. Paterson is co-founder and President of the Equal Justice Society, a nonprofit organization founded in 2000 to transform the nation’s consciousness of race through law, social science, and the arts. Her extensive experience as a civil rights attorney includes thirteen years as Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and eighteen years as co-chair (as well as co-founder) of the California Civil Rights Coalition. As the first African-American student body president at her undergraduate university, she was catapulted into the national spotlight at age 20 when she debated then-Vice President Spiro T. Agnew on live television. Paterson is a graduate of Northwestern University and the UC Berkeley School of Law.
Anthony D. Romero has been the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, the nation’s premier defender of civil liberties, since 2001. He took the helm of the organization just seven days before the September 11th attacks, and has presided over the most prodigious growth in the ACLU’s history, dramatically increasing its membership, national and affiliate staff, and budget. Romero is the ACLU’s sixth executive director and the first Latino and openly gay man to serve in that capacity. Born in New York City to parents who hailed from Puerto Rico, Romero was the first in his family to graduate from high school. He is a graduate of Stanford Law School and The Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.