On February 1, 2008, about 5 students were fortunate to meet with Anita Earls at the Law School. Anita Earls has practiced law with an emphasis on civil rights for over twenty years. After graduating from Yale University, her law career lead her to a firm in Charlotte where she worked with a prominent lawyer who was assigned to such benchmark civil rights cases as Plessey v Ferguson. Earls eventually began to see the law system reverting back and some of the civil rights cases losing ground. Growing up in a multi-cultural family, Earls was compelled to find a context in which to fight for the rights of all people. Eventually, she left work in private sector and is currently a public defender in Durham. It has been her work in the recent months that is vital to our work within Human Rights Cities. Earls believes that civil rights should be viewed through the lens of human rights. She has formed the Southern Coalition for Social Justice (http://www.southerncoalition.org/). The Southern Coalition for Social Justice focuses on using community organization and mobilization in order to enact change. She sees her organization spreading across the South with support from people within communities ranging for lawyers to media experts to people who specialize in community organization.
Here are links to some of her suggested resources:
Carolina Women’s Center
North Carolina Chapter NAACP
http://www.unc.edu/student/orgs/naacp/
North Carolina Chapter of ACLU
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