The Erosion of Rights

March 21, 2007, 12:30pm – 2:00pm

About This Event

With the release of "The Erosion of Rights," the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights and the Center for American Progress details the detrimental effect that the Bush Administration has had on our nation's civil rights and civil liberties. Since 2000, the administration has allowed the historical tools of the executive branch for civil rights enforcement to collapse, leaving many of our citizens susceptible to unequal opportunity and rising religious and racial intolerance.

"The Erosion of Rights" reveals exactly how civil rights enforcement by the executive branch over the last six years has fallen into a dangerous state of disrepair where the focus has turned to "reverse discrimination" rather than clear patterns and practices of discrimination against African Americans and other racial minorities. The panel of experts will discuss the critical civil rights issues in voting, education, housing, immigration, and communications policies and share recommendations on how to strengthen civil rights enforcement and put the nation back on track in reclaiming the promise of equal opportunity for all. Featured Panelists:
Bill Taylor, President, Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights
Mark Lloyd, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
Peter Zamora, Regional Counsel, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund
Richard Ugelow, Practitioner-in-Residence, Washington College of Law, American University

Moderated by:
Cassandra Butts, Senior Vice President for Domestic Policy, Center for American Progress

Location

Center for American Progress
1333 H St. NW, 10th Floor
Washington, DC 20005

Biographies

William Taylor is a lawyer, teacher, and writer in the fields of civil rights and education. He practices law in Washington, D.C., specializing in litigation and other forms of advocacy on behalf of low income and minority children. Mr. Taylor is a graduate of Brooklyn College and the Yale Law School. He began his legal career in 1954 as an attorney on the staff of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. In the 1960s he served as General Counsel and later as staff director of the United States Commission on Civil Rights where he directed major investigations and research studies that contributed to the civil rights laws enacted in the 60s. In 1970, Mr. Taylor founded the Center for National Policy review, a civil rights research and advocacy organization funded by private foundations that he directed for 16 years.
In the courtroom, Mr. Taylor has been lead counsel for black children in several major school desegregation cases, including St. Louis where he secured the largest voluntary metropolitan school desegregation plan in the nation. On the legislative front, Mr. Taylor has long been a leader of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and currently serves as Vice Chairman. Working with the Leadership Conference in 1982, he played a major role as a legislative strategist bringing about the extension and strengthening of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He was leader in the coalition of civil rights organizations that successfully blocked the confirmation of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987. More recently, he helped lead successful efforts to enact the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988, the Civil Rights act of 1991, and the 1993 National Voter Registration Act. Mr. Taylor was a founder and now serves as the Acting Chair of the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights. For the Citizens' Commission, he has served as co-editor for a series of reports documenting the failures of civil rights enforcement during the 1980s and making recommendations for change.
For the last several years, Mr. Taylor has worked on education reform legislation to advance opportunity for poor and minority children.
Mr. Taylor has taught civil rights and education law at Catholic University Law School and at Stanford Law School. He now teaches education law as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law School. He has written widely about public law and policy issues for legal and education journals, magazines, and newspapers, and is the author of the book, Hanging Together: Equality in an Urban Nation (1971). Among the honors he has received is the first Thurgood Marshall award conferred by the District of Columbia Bar in 1993.

Mark Lloyd is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and an affiliated professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute.
From the fall of 2002 until the summer of 2004, Mr. Lloyd was a Martin Luther King, Jr. visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught communications policy and wrote and conducted research on the relationship between communications policy and strong democratic communities. He also served as the executive director of the Civil Rights Forum on Communications Policy, a non-profit, non-partisan project he co-founded in 1997 to bring civil rights principles and advocacy to the communications policy debate. Previously, Mr. Lloyd worked as general counsel to the Benton Foundation, and as a communications attorney at Dow, Lohnes & Albertson in Washington, D.C., representing both commercial and non-commercial companies. He also has over a dozen years of experience as a broadcast journalist including work as a reporter and producer at NBC and CNN.
A widely-published author in both popular and academic publications, his book Prologue to a Farce: Communication and Democracy in America was released by the University of Illinois Press in 2007.

Peter Zamora currently serves as the Washington, D.C. Regional Counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and in that role develops and manages MALDEF's federal legislative strategies regarding education law and policy, voting rights, immigration, and other matters. He serves as Co-Chair of the Hispanic Education Coalition, which unites 25 national and local organizations in support of improved educational opportunities for Latino students and families. Mr. Zamora has received a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley, a teaching credential from the University of San Francisco, and a law degree from the Georgetown University Law Center. He served as a bilingual-credentialed English teacher for three years in California public schools.

Richard Ugelow is a Practitioner-in-Residence at the Washington College of Law, American University. Prior to joining the faculty in 2002, he was a Deputy Section Chief of the Employment Litigation Section, Civil Rights Division, U.S. Department of Justice. There, he was responsible for investigations and litigation to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Professor Ugelow personally tried several complex "pattern or practice" cases of employment discrimination filed against public sector and private employers. He was the government’s lead trial attorney in defending challenges to the constitutionality of federally sponsored affirmative action programs, particularly statutes and programs designed to provide contracting opportunities to minority, disadvantaged, and women-owned businesses.

Cassandra Q. Butts is Senior Vice President for Domestic Policy. Prior to joining The Center for American Progress, she was a senior advisor to Representative Richard A. Gephardt and volunteered as the policy director on his 2004 presidential campaign. Cassandra coordinated the formulation of policy on Rep. Gephardt's presidential campaign that included a universal health care plan and economic development proposals. In her seven years of work for Rep. Gephardt during his tenure as the House Democratic Leader, Cassandra was a principal adviser on matters involving the judiciary, financial services and information technology. She provided counsel and strategic advice to the Democratic Leader on a range of major proposals that came before the U.S. Congress including the 1998 presidential impeachment and legislation related to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, including the drafting of the groundbreaking September 11th Victim Compensation Fund of 2001. In July 2000, she also served as an international election observer to the Zimbabwe parliamentary elections.
Prior to her service with Rep. Gephardt, Cassandra was an Assistant Counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, where she worked on civil rights policy and litigated voting rights and school desegregation cases. She also served as Legislative Counsel to Senator Harris L. Wofford of Pennsylvania. Cassandra is a recipient of the Georgetown Women's Law and Public Policy Fellowship and the Stennis Congressional Staff Fellowship. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.