Penda Hair
| Penda Hair | |
|---|---|
| Born | United States |
| Occupation | Civil rights advocate |
Penda Hair is an American lawyer. She is a founding co-director of the civil rights group Advancement Project. A frequent television and radio commentator, she speaks regularly on issues of race and democracy.
Attorney Hair is a graduate of the University of Tennessee and Harvard Law School. After Harvard Law, she clerked for U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Wilfred Feinberg. She later clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun. From 1982 to 1999, Hair served as staff lawyer and, later, the director of the Washington, D.C. office of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund before founding Advancement Project.
She is also the author of the Rockefeller Foundation’s report on community lawyering, Louder Than Words: Lawyers, Communities, and the Struggle for Justice (2001).
Hair co-founded Advancement Project in 1999 with several peers, many formerly of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. They created the nonprofit to serve as a new, innovative racial justice organization that works to eradicate structural inequities by providing legal, communications and organizing support for community-based grassroots groups, to build and strengthen their capacity.
At Advancement Project, Hair manages a team of voting rights attorneys and helps oversee the organization’s voter protection work. She also works alongside attorney and advocate, Judith Browne Dianis, her fellow co-director at Advancement Project.
Under Hair’s direction, Advancement Project has spearheaded litigation challenging voting restrictions, discriminatory electoral provisions and other civil rights violations across the nation. Hair fought against the disenfranchisement of African-American voters during the 2000 presidential election in Florida, investigating black voters who had found difficulty voting due to being wrongly listed as ineligible to vote. She has also campaigned for the restoration of voting rights of people with felony convictions in Virginia. In the 2008 and 2012 elections, Hair spearheaded campaigns challenging voter ID restrictions and other discriminatory electoral provisions.
...
Wikipedia