Board of Directors

CHAIR
John Charles Boger, Dean of the Univ. of North Carolina Law School, Chapel Hill, NC 

VICE-CHAIR
José Padilla, Executive Director, California Rural Legal Assistance, San Francisco, CA 

TREASURER
Spence Limbocker is former President of the Neighborhood Funders Group in Washington, D.C.

SECRETARY
john powell, Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for Race and Ethnicity at Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University.

Janis Bowdler, National Council of La Raza

John Brittain, University of the District of Columbia School of Law

Sheryll Cashin, Professor, Georgetown Law School

Craig Flournoy, Assistant Professor of Journalism, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX

Damon Hewitt, Director of Education Practice, NAACP Legal Defense Fund

Olati Johnson, Associate Professor, Columbia Law School, New York, NY

Elizabeth Julian, Inclusive Communities Project, Dallas, TX

Demetria McCain Director of Advocacy and Education, Inclusive Communities Project, Dallas, TX

S.M. Miller, Senior Fellow, Commonwealth Institute and Research Professor of Sociology at Boston College

Don Nakanishi, Director of the Asian American Studies Center and Professor in the Graduate School of Education, UCLA 

Dennis Parker, Director of Racial Justice Programs, ACLU 

Anthony Sarmiento, National Senior Citizens Education and Research Center, Silver Spring, MD

Ted Shaw, Columbia Law School

Brian Smedley, Vice President, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies

Catherine Tactaquin, National Director, National Network for Immigrant & Refugee Rights, Oakland, CA 

Camille Wood, National Legal Aid & Defender Association, Washington, DC

Board Member Brief Bios

John Charles Boger is Dean at the Univ. of North Carolina Law School and cofounder of the UNC Center for Civil Rights. He holds both a Masters of Divinity from Yale and a law degree from UNC. From 1978-90 he was with the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, both as Director of their Poverty & Justice Project and as Director of their Capital Punishment Project.  www.law.unc.edu

Janis Bowdler is Deputy Director of the Wealth-Building Policy Project at the National Council of La Raza. Within this position she oversees policy analysis, research, and advocacy on issues related to housing, homeownership, wealth-building, and financial services. Prior to joining NCLR, Bowdler was a Project Manager to the residential redevelopment project at Famicos Foundation in Cleveland, Ohio. She hold’s a Master’s degree in urban policy from Cleveland State University. Ms. Bowdler has authored a number of publications on Hispanic homeownership and abusive mortgage lending practices, among others, and has testified before Congress on issues regarding wealth-building challenges in the Latino community.

John Brittain is a professor of law at the University of the District of Columbia. He previously served as General Counsel and Senior Deputy Director at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. As Chief Counsel, he was responsible for determining civil rights litigation strategies and public policy issues. He assisted in filing numerous amicus briefs in the Supreme Court and many other federal and state courts. Prior to his work at the Lawyer’s Committee, Brittain was a law professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law in Hartford, and Dean of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law in Houston. Professor Brittain is a school desegregation specialist and was one of the lawyers who filed the landmark Sheff v. O’Neill school desegregation case in 1989. This lawsuit challenged the racial, economic, and educational segregation between Hartford and the surrounding school districts as a denial of a student’s fundamental right to an equal education under the Connecticut Constitution. In 1993, the NAACP awarded Professor Brittain the coveted William Robert Ming Advocacy Award for legal service to the NAACP without a fee. Brittain earned his B.A. and J.D degrees from Howard University and specializes in civil rights litigation theories in education, voting rights, affirmative action, affordable housing, and police misconduct.

Sheryll Cashin is a Professor of Law at Georgetown University, where she specializes in Administrative Law, Constitutional Law, Local Government Law, and Race and American Law. Professor Cashin’s publications include The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class are Undermining the American Dream (Public Affairs, 2004) and The Agitator's Daughter: A Memoir of Four Generations of One Extraordinary African-American Family (Public Affairs, 2008). Prior to joining the Georgetown faculty, Professor Cashin was Director of Community Development for the National Economic Council at the White House, where she managed interagency policy development processes for urban policy and community development initiatives. Professor Cashin was law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and Judge Abner Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. She received her BA from Vanderbilt University in 1984, a Master’s in English Law from Oxford University in J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she was a member of the Harvard Law Review.

Craig Flournoy is an Assistant Professor of Journalism at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. For over a decade, he was a reporter for the Dallas Morning News where he won a Pulitzer Prize (among many other awards) for his investigative reporting, including "Separate and Unequal," a series on racial discrimination and segregation in HUD's low-income housing programs throughout the country. His undergraduate degree is from the University of New Orleans, and he holds a Masters from SMU, a doctorate from Louisiana State University.

Damon Hewitt is Director of Education Practice at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Mr. Hewitt founded LDF’s “Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline” initiative, and has also coordinated LDF’s post-Hurricane Katrina litigation and advocacy efforts. He served as counsel in Wallace v. Blanco, a federal civil rights lawsuit that sought to ensure that displaced New Orleans voters could have meaningful access to the ballot in the first elections since the city was devastated by flooding, and was lead counsel in Boisseau v. Picard, a suit defending the educational rights of children displaced by the storm. He is currently on the litigation team in Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center v. HUD, a case alleging discriminatory allocation of federal disaster relief grants. A native of New Orleans, Mr. Hewitt attended Louisiana State University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Elizabeth (Betsy) Julian is president of the Dallas-based Inclusive Communities Project. From 1990 to 1994, she worked as Deputy General Counsel for Civil Rights & Litigation, later as Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. Her pre-HUD experience includes 20 years of practice of poverty and civil rights law in Texas, where she represented primarily low-income clients in cases involving housing discrimination, voting rights, municipal services discrimination and indigent health care. From 1988-90 she was executive director of Legal Services of North Texas, and helped found the Texas Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Olati Johnson is an assistant professor at the Columbia Law School. Until May 2004 she served as a consultant to the National Legal Department of the ACLU, where she helped develop a strategic plan for the organization on racial justice issues. From September 2001 until September 2003, she served as counsel to Senator Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee where she worked on civil rights, judicial nominations, religion and first amendment issues. Prior to that Ms. Johnson was an assistant counsel for four years at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund where she worked on a range of issues including higher education affirmative action, employment discrimination, education policy, and welfare and low-wage employment policy. Ms. Johnson graduated in 1995 from Stanford Law School where she was Order of the Coif, and received her B.A. in Literature Cum Laude from Yale University in 1989.

Spence Limbocker has over forty years experience working in community based organizations and with philanthropic institutions whose mission has been the support the development of effective community and economic development organizations in low and moderate income communities. Since retiring in 2008 after serving as the executive director of the Neighborhood Funders Group for twelve years, Spence has been doing consulting work with several non profit organizations.

Demetria McCain is Director of Advocacy and Education for the Inclusive Communities Project in Dallas. Ms. McCain previously held positions at Neighborhood Legal Services in Washington, D.C. and at the National Housing Law Project.

S.M. (Mike) Miller, an economic sociologist/activist theoretician, is director of the Project on Inequality and Poverrty at the Commonwealth Institute, Cambridge, MA. and former chair of the sociology deparrtment at Boston University. He has a B.A. in economics from Brooklyn College, a M.A. in economics from Columbia, a M.A. in economics from Princeton and a Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton. He has taught at NYU, Syracuse, Brooklyn College, Rutgers and in labor programs at Cornell, Michigan, Rutgers, University of Massachusetts. He was an advisor on poverty at the Ford Foundation where he initiated its Latino and Native American programs and served on the executive committee of the Field Foundation. He was co-founder and first president of the Research Committee on Poverty and Social Welfare of the International Sociological Association. He is a co-founder of United for a Fair Economy. His most recent book is Respect and Rights. His current project is on long-term economic and political directions and strategies.

Don Nakanishi recently retired as Director of the Asian American Studies Center and Professor in the Graduate School of Education, UCLA. His AB is from Yale, his PhD from Harvard. He was founder and publisher of Amerasia Journal and formerly President of the Association of Asian American Studies. His special areas of interest are educational policy issues facing Asian Americans, political participation of minority and immigrant groups, and the international dimensions of minority group experiences.  www.sscnet.ucla.edu/aasc

José Padilla is Executive Director of California Rural Legal Assistance and where he has been for more than 25 years. He received his law degree from UC-Berkeley and his undergraduate degree from Stanford. Among his special interests bilingual and migrant education and farm worker legal services. The Mexican government presented him with the prestigious Ohtli Award for his service to Mexican citizens in the United States. www.crla.org

Dennis Parker is Director of the Racial Justice Program at the American Civil Liberties Union. Prior to joining the ACLU, Dennis was Chief of the Civil Rights Bureau in the Office of New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer where he oversaw the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws in housing, employment, voting, public accommodations and credit. He is also a 14 year veteran of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, where he supervised the litigation of scores of school desegregation cases, as well as cases involving affirmative action in higher education.

john powell is Professor of Law and Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. He formerly was Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Adjunct Professor at Columbia Law School, Executive Director of Greater Miami Legal Services and on the staff of Evergreen Legal Services. His undergraduate degree is from Stanford, and his law degree is from UC-Berkeley.

Anthony Sarmiento is Executive Director of Senior Service America Inc. in Silver Spring, Maryland, a national nonprofit organization that operates programs for older workers. He is currently on leave from the AFL-CIO, where he held several positions in the Education and Organizing Departments, including director of Union Summer, the AFL-CIO's summer internship program in union organizing. His prior work includes positions with local government and community based organizations in the District of Columbia. He graduated from American University with a B.A. in American Studies.

Theodore M. Shaw is Associate Director-Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund in NYC and previously was Western Regional Counsel in the Fund's Los Angeles office. He formerly was on the faculty of the Univ. of Michigan Law School, where he taught civil rights, constitutional law and civil procedure, and served in the Civil Rights Division of the US Dept. of Justice. His undergraduate degree is from Wesleyan, and his law degree is from Columbia. 

Catherine Tactaquin is National Director of the National Network for Immigrant & Refugee Rights in Oakland, CA, an alliance of national and local organizations advocating policies and programs to improve civil and human rights for immigrants. She was a national coordinator of the Union of Democratic Filipinos and recipient of a Charles Bannerman Memorial Fellowship. She attended UC-Berkeley and UC-Santa Cruz and has taught at San Francisco State Univ. and the Univ. of Hawaii.  www.nnirr.org

Camille Wood is Senior Staff at the National Legal Aid and Defender Association. She previously worked with the Center for Law & Social Policy as Co-Director of its Project for the Future of Equal Justice. In 2002, she helped form the Mississippi Center for Social Justice, a collaborative racial and economic justice law firm that practices community problem-solving approaches. Ms. Wood has also served as Executive Director of the Southern Africa Legal Service & Legal Education Project. A graduate of Harvard/Radcliffe Colleges and the Harvard Law School, she clerked for Sixth Circuit Judge Damon Keith.

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