Daryl V. Atkinson is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ) where he focuses on drug policy and criminal justice reform issues, particularly removing the legal barriers triggered by contact with the criminal justice system. In 1996, Daryl pled guilty to a first-time, non-violent, drug crime and served 40 months in prison. Since his release, Daryl completed college and law school and has become a zealous advocate for second chances for people with criminal records.

Leonard Noisette is the director of the Justice Fund for U.S. Programs at the Open Society Foundations. In this role, he leads the foundation’s efforts to reduce mass incarceration, eliminate harsh punishment, and promote system accountability. Prior to joining the foundation, Noisette served as the longtime executive director of the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, an innovative public defender office renowned for its development of community-based, full service representation of clients. He was a member of the Executive Session on Public Defense, sponsored by the Federal Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Kennedy School of Government.

Lynne Stewart is a radical human rights attorney who has devoted her life to the oppressed – a constant advocate for the countless many deprived in the United States of their freedom and their rights. Lynne has been falsely accused of helping terrorists in an obvious attempt by the U.S. government to silence dissent, curtail vigorous defense lawyers, and install fear in those who would fight against the U.S. government’s racism, seek to help Arabs and Muslims being prosecuted for free speech and defend the rights of all oppressed people. She was arrested in April 2002 and arraigned before Manhattan federal Judge John Koeltl, who also presided over her trial in 2004. She was convicted, and received a 28-month sentence in October 2006. However she was free on bail until 2009, when the government appealed the sentence. In late 2009 Lynne was re-sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. Lynne was freed from prison on December 31, 2013 and is now home with her family!

Rick Jones is the Executive Director and a founding member of the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem (NDS). He is a distinguished trial lawyer with more than 25 years’ experience in complex multi-forum litigation. He is a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School and on the faculty of the National Criminal Defense College (NCDC) in Macon, GA.

Carl Williams joined the ACLU of Massachusetts as staff attorney in September 2013. He was previously a criminal defense attorney with the Roxbury Defenders Unit of the Committee for Public Counsel Services. A long-time resident of Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, he has been an activist and organizer on issues of war, immigrants’ rights, LGBT rights, racial justice and Palestinian self-determination. Carl is a member of the National Lawyers Guild and has served on its Massachusetts board of directors. During the Occupy Boston movement he was part of its legal defense and support team, which provided nearly 24-hour support to the participants.

Gay J. McDougall served as the first United Nations Independent Expert on Minority Issues from 2005 to 2011. She was executive director of the international NGO Global Rights from 1994 to 2006. From 1997 to 2001, she served as an Independent Expert on the UN treaty body that oversees compliance with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, during which time she negotiated the adoption of General Recommendation XXV on the Gender Dimensions of Racial Discrimination, which requires governments to report explicitly on the situation of women impacted by racial discrimination. She played a leadership role in the UN Third World Conference Against Racism.

As Special Rapporteur on the issue of systematic rape and sexual slavery practices in armed conflict when she served on the UN Sub-Commission on Promotion and Protection of Human Rights (1995 to 1999), she led that body in calling for international legal standards for the prosecution of such acts.
She was one of five international members of the South African governmental body established through the multi-party negotiations to set policy and administer the country’s first democratic, non-racial elections in 1994, resulting in the election of President Nelson Mandela and the transition from apartheid. For 14 years prior to that appointment, she served as director of the Southern Africa Project of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. In that capacity, she worked with South African lawyers to secure the release of thousands of political prisoners.

McDougall was the Robert Drinan Visiting Professor in Human Rights at the Georgetown University Law Center from 2011 to 2012. She was a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American University Washington College of Law from 2006 to 2008 and a professor in the annual Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the American University.

In 1999, McDougall was a recipient of the coveted MacArthur “Genius” Award. She has also received the Butcher Medal of the American Society of International Law for outstanding contributions to human rights law and the Thurgood Marshall Award of the District of Columbia Bar Association among numerous other national and international awards.

She received a J.D. from Yale Law School and an LL.M. from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has Honorary Doctors of Law degrees from Georgetown University Law Center, the School of Law of the City University of New York, and Agnes Scott College.

Lisa Crooms-Robinson is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Howard University School of Law.  Her most recent publication is The Oxford Handbook of African American Citizenship, 1865-present (2012), of which she is a co-editor.  Her current work-in-progress is an essay entitled, “Making All Black Lives Matter: Respectable Negroes, Disreputable Negresses, and the Search for Dignity.”  Crooms-Robinson received her B.A. in Economics from Howard University and her J.D. from the University of Michigan.  She is a Fulbright Scholar, having spent time at the Norman Manley Law School at the University of the West Indies where she researched the relationship between gender, violence and law in the construction of Jamaican post-independence national identity.

Martinez Sutton is anti-police brutality activist from Chicago, Illinois. He is the brother of Rekia Boyd who was murdered by a Chicago Police Detective on March 21, 2012. Rekia's case has since become a national issue which has sparked actions across the nation to highlight the under-reported cases of Black women and girls who are/were victims of police terror. Since her murder, Martinez dedicated his life to continuously fight for the rights of not only his sister, but for all women and girls who have fell victim to society’s brutal norm. He is the founder of Rekia’s Haven, a mentorship program based on developing youth to prepare them for a better tomorrow.

Addrana Montgomery is a staff attorney with the Community Development Project at the Urban Justice Center where she works on preservation of affordable housing in New York City. Addrana has championed social justice movements across the globe, including in Southern Africa, where she served as one of the youngest overseas election monitors for South Africa’s first democratic election.  Witnessing South Africa’s transition to a post-apartheid, majority-led government inspired her to use the law to effect social change. During her clerkship at the Constitutional Court of South Africa, the country’s apex court, she wrote and drafted opinions ranging from housing and land use cases to the right of cultural expression in public schools, all within a human rights legal paradigm.  Her work at the Court continues to inspire and inform her human and civil rights legal and political activism in this country.  In between her legal work, Addrana has worked on and organized several national, New York City-wide and local political campaigns.

Meena Jagannath, co-founder of the Community Justice Project, Inc., is a movement lawyer with an extensive background in international human rights.  Prior to coming to Miami, she worked for the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux in Port-au-Prince, Haiti where she coordinated the Rape Accountability and Prevention Project, which combined direct legal representation with advocacy and capacity building of grassroots women’s groups.  While using her legal skills to build the power of movements locally in South Florida, she has also been a part of delegations to the United Nations to elevate U.S.-based human rights issues like police accountability and gun violence to the international level. 

Meena has published several articles in law journals and other media outlets.  She received her J.D from University of Washington Law School where she was a William H. Gates Public Service Law Scholar. She also holds a Master's degree in International Affairs (human rights) from Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, and a BA in International Relations and Peace and Justice Studies from Tufts University.

Joey L. Mogul is a partner at the People’s Law Office.  Mogul’s practice focuses on representing people who have suffered from police and other governmental torture, abuse and misconduct in civil rights cases, and defending individuals in criminal and capital cases.  Mogul also teaches and directs the Civil Rights Clinic at DePaul University College of Law.

Mogul has sought justice for Chicago Police torture survivors for the last fifteen years, representing torture survivors in their criminal post-conviction proceedings and in federal civil rights cases.  Mogul also successfully presented the cases to the UN Committee Against Torture (CAT) and the Human Rights Committee in Geneva, Switzerland in 2006, obtaining a specific finding from the CAT calling for the prosecution of the perpetrators and accountability in these cases.

For the past nine years, Mogul has represented a class of over 800 people falsely arrested en masse at an anti-Iraq war demonstration in Chicago on March 20, 2003, and successfully argued the case in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Vodak v. City of Chicago, et al., 639 F.3d 738 (2011).  Mogul also co-coordinated the NLG mass defense of individuals arrested at this and other anti-war protests, and successfully obtained an acquittal on behalf of the only person arrested and forced to trial on charges stemming from the March 20, 2003 protest.

Mogul frequently represents lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people in criminal court and civil rights proceedings involving police and prison misconduct, abuse, rape and torture.  Mogul’s activism has included securing organizational support from LGBT individuals and organizations for, and spearheading campaigns on behalf of, capital defendants who have been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death based on homophobic, transphobic and sexist arguments. Mogul has spoken widely before both legal and popular audiences on the state’s use of racist, homophobic and sexist arguments in criminal cases and has devised legal training to counter such efforts. Mogul is co-author of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Beacon Press 2011).

Monifa Akinwole-Bandele is a blogger, human rights activist, community engagement consultant, and a co-founder and coordinator for 10 years of the Black August Hip Hop Project, an international activist/artist alliance, with ties in Cuba, South Africa, Tanzania, Venezuela and Brazil. Black August is one of the many programs of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM). As an activist with MXGM, Monifa works on issues of police brutality and political prisoners. Monifa currently serves as the food and economic security campaign director for MomsRising.org, an organization of more than one million members, and the senior training advisor for the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation (NCBCP). Prior to joining NCBCP she led a national campaign to expand voting rights to people with felony convictions in 15 states as the national field director for the Brennan Center for Justice Right to Vote Campaign (RTV) expanding voting rights to more than 250,000 people. A little known fact about Monifa is that her first husband was the artist formerly know as Prince!

Baher Azmy is the Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He directs all litigation and advocacy around issues related to the promotion of civil and human rights. At CCR, he has litigated cases related to discriminatory policing practices (stop and frisk), government surveillance, the rights of Guantanamo detainees, and accountability for victims of torture. Baher is currently on leave from his faculty position at Seton Hall University School of Law, where he taught Constitutional Law and directed the Civil Rights and Constitutional Litigation Clinic.  While a Clinical Law Professor, Baher represented Murat Kurnaz, a German resident of Turkish descent imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, until his release in August 2006. In addition, he litigated cases challenging police misconduct and violations of the rights of immigrants, prisoners, and the press. He has authored numerous legal briefs in the federal appeals courts and the United States Supreme Court on issues related to human rights and constitutional law, testified before Congress, and produced substantial scholarship on issues of access to justice. He is a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and of NYU School of Law, where he was a Root-Tilden-Snow Public Interest Scholar.  In 2012, Baher was selected as one of the top 500 lawyers in America by Lawdragon Magazine.

The City of New Orleans welcomed Susan Hutson as the Independent Police Monitor in June of 2010. Prior to accepting the position in New Orleans, Ms. Hutson worked at the Los Angeles Police Commission’s Office of the Inspector General as an Assistant Inspector General from June of 2007 until May of 2010.

Ms. Hutson holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a J.D. from Tulane University School of Law. After law school, she joined a small firm of lawyers, where she had a general practice.  She left private practice to join the Corpus Christi City Attorney's Office where she served as an assistant city attorney prosecuting cases in the Municipal Court. She became Chief Prosecutor and later moved to the Employment Section, where she advised city directors on numerous employment matters, including disciplinary, constitutional, discrimination, and compensation issues. Her primary responsibilities were consulting with the Chief of Police, the Fire Chief, and other supervisors on misconduct investigations and representing the city during arbitrations and civil service hearings. While in Corpus Christi, Ms. Hutson also taught university-level courses to both undergraduate and graduate students.

Her experience in dealing with Internal Affairs and civil service law led her to the Office of the Police Monitor in Austin, Texas. She began as the Assistant Police Monitor in August of 2004 and took over as the Acting Police Monitor in January of 2006.

While working in Austin and Los Angeles, Ms. Hutson published reports for these offices, which provide valuable information to the community about how their police departments monitor themselves.

Iris Roley, a native of Cincinnati, Ohio, a freedom advocate for 13 years, designed and monitored Cincinnati Police Department (CPD) reform.
The wrongful death of two unarmed black men by the CPD in November of 2001 compelled the Cincinnati Black United Front (CBUF) to address the 14th and 15th killings in a five year period. With the blessing of the African American (AA) community, multiple community meetings/conversations were initiated.

As the Project Manager for the CBUF, Iris implemented a plan of action and strategically collected stories from the AA community to identify the problems, determine the origin of the problems and their locations, and provided a forum for community engagement to implement collective remedies.
As a result of community mobilization, over 400 stories of police brutality and misconduct‐ were collected, and documented. The documentation was the catalyst used to file a class action lawsuit against the city of Cincinnati and its police department in federal court. The lawsuit is known as the historic Collaborative Agreement and the Memorandum of Understanding between the City of Cincinnati and the Department of Justice.

Ed Whitfield is a social critic, writer and community activist who has lived in Greensboro since 1970. He is co-Managing Director of the Fund for Democratic Communities.

Originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, Ed’s political activism started with attending Little Rock Central High School and beginning to do anti-war work as a teenager. Ed retired after 30 years in industry before becoming involved with philanthropy. He now speaks and writes on issues of cooperatives and economic development while continuing to be interested in issues of war and peace, as well as education and social responses to racism. Ed serves on the boards of Carolina Common Enterprise and Highlander Research and Education Center.

Reverend Heber Brown grew up in a family of preachers, church musicians and vocalists, an upbringing that helped him to discover his passion to serve God and community. He earned a BS in psychology from Morgan State University and his Master of Divinity degree from the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology at Virginia Union University in Richmond in 2005. Shortly thereafter, he was ordained in the Baptist Church.

Today, Rev. Brown serves as pastor of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in North Baltimore. He works alongside a variety of community organizations that address issues such as homelessness, poverty, racism, worker’s rights, environmental justice, peacemaking, and national/international social justice concerns. He is a regular voice in local media outlets and for nearly 5 years has explored the intersection of religion, policy and activism on his blog, Faith in Action. He is the recipient of the Ella Baker Freedom Fighter Award, the Kingdom Ambassador Award, and in 2007, The Baltimore Afro American mewspaper identified Pastor Brown as one of the “25 Under 40 Emerging Black History Leaders.” However, he says his greatest achievement is being a husband and a father. He and his lovely wife, Chante’ are the proud parents of one son, Heber M. Brown, IV.

Professor Jones is the supervising attorney of the Small Business Clinic. Before joining the Law School faculty in 1988, she was a private civil and administrative law practitioner. She has held teaching positions at City University of New York Law School at Queens College, where she taught lawyering skills and clinical simulations from 1985 to 1986 and as the 2004 Haywood Burns Visiting Chair in Civil Rights where she taught courses on community economic development and economic justice; at American University’s Washington College of Law, where she taught legal writing; and at Antioch School of Law, where she taught in an immigration law clinic.

Professor Jones is the former senior editor and editor-in-chief of the ABA’s Journal of Affordable Housing and Community Development Law. She has written extensively about microenterprise and community economic development. Her research interests include the legal aspects of entrepreneurship, economic development, nonprofit organizations, and the arts.

Tracy is a mother, activist, and attorney with over ten years of experience working on a range of legal issues disparately impacting the African Diaspora community.  Through her socio-political lens, Tracy regards the various cooperative economic models utilized by southern Black agrarians as worthy of immense study and replication to address the deleterious conditions confronting both people of color communities and working poor communities in the United States.  In 2012, Tracy co-founded the Black Belt Justice Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and regeneration of African American ancestral lands and land-based livelihoods through effective legal representation, advocacy, and community education. Greatly influenced by the visionary blueprints of the Emergency Land Fund and the New Communities Community Land Trust, Tracy is dedicated to the advancement of alternative financing innovations as well as collective forms of land ownership.  Currently, Tracy is working to develop the Black Agrarian Fund, a community-centric revolving loan fund to address the unique financial needs of beginning and returning generation Black agrarians and land-based cooperatives.  Moreover, Tracy has provided legal representation to numerous community-based farm organizations that serve diverse agrarians and rural communities, including the Oklahoma Black Historical Research Project, the National Immigrant Farming Initiative, and the Southeastern African American Farmers Organic Network. In 2013, Tracy received the Fruit of the Land Award from the North Carolina Association of Black Lawyers Land Loss Prevention Project.

Dorcas R. Gilmore is Assistant General Counsel in the NAACP Legal Department where she represents the NAACP National Office and assists its over 1200 branches and units nationwide.  In this role, she advances the NAACP’s racial justice advocacy mission on issues of economic justice and provides corporate counsel.  Also, Ms. Gilmore serves as the Director of Community Economic Development in the NAACP Economic Department where she oversees efforts to promote the creation and growth of small businesses, individual wealth building primarily through matched savings accounts, and community asset building.

Ms. Gilmore has over 8 years of experience in the community economic development field.   As a Skadden Fellow and Staff Attorney at the Community Law Center, Inc., she created the Youth Entrepreneurship Initiative providing a range of business and nonprofit legal services to youth-led organizations.  Also, she directed the Small Business Legal Services Program & Youth Entrepreneurship Initiative and the Equitable Development Project.  Ms. Gilmore has represented community organizations, social ventures, and coalitions seeking to promote racial and economic equity in their local communities and looks forward to leveraging these experiences and relationships to strengthen the economic fabrics of communities of color. 

Ms. Gilmore earned her law degree from the University of Maryland School of Law. The 2004 Gilbert & Jaylee Mead Public Interest Scholar, Ms. Gilmore  received numerous awards recognizing her commitment to service and the public interest, including the NAACP LDF’s Earl Warren Scholarship.  Ms. Gilmore graduated magna cum laude from Rollins College with an Honors Bachelor of Arts. 

Ms. Gilmore is a member of the Governing Committee of the ABA Forum on Affordable Housing and Community Development Law and a founding member of its Young Lawyers Network.  She also serves on the Board of Directors of the Women’s Law Center of Maryland.  Ms. Gilmore is the author of several articles and book chapters on law and leadership, youth entrepreneurship legal services, and community lawyering. 

Alisha has been a member of Sylvia Rivera Law Project's core collective since 2009 and served as a staff attorney and Director of the Prisoner Justice Project 2012-2014. As a staff attorney, Alisha was able to engage in community organizing for prison abolition while seeking immediate institutional changes to provide access to safer correctional housing for trans community members. Alisha is now a Senior Staff Attorney at the Urban Justice Center's Peter Cicchino Youth Project where she works with homeless or street-involved queer and trans youth. Through her own writing and speaking engagements, she seeks to center the voices of incarcerated trans people.

Andrea Ritchie is a Black lesbian police misconduct attorney and organizer who has engaged in extensive research, writing, litigation, organizing and advocacy on profiling, policing, and physical and sexual violence by law enforcement agents against women, girls and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people of color over the past two decades. In 2014 she was awarded a Senior Soros Justice Fellowship to engage in documentation and advocacy around profiling and policing of women of color – trans and not trans, queer and not queer.

Over the past 5 years Andrea helped found and coordinate Streetwise & Safe (SAS), www.streetwiseandsafe.org, a leadership development initiative aimed at sharing “know your rights” information, strategies for safety and visions for change among LGBT youth of color who experience of gender, race, sexuality and poverty-based policing and criminalization, and now serves as the organization’s Senior Policy Counsel. As such, she serves on the steering committee of Communities United for Police Reform (CPR), www.changethenypd.org, a city-wide campaign to challenge discriminatory, unlawful and abusive policing practices in New York City led by grassroots community groups, legal organizations, policy advocates and researchers from all five boroughs.

Andrea is co-author of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Beacon Press 2011), www.queerinjustice.com, and of A Roadmap for Change: Federal Policy Recommendations for Addressing the Criminalization of LGBT People and People Living with HIV, published by the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School in 2014, and Surviving the Streets of New York: Experiences of LGBTQ Youth, YMSM, and YWSW Engaged in Survival Sex, published by the Urban Institute.

Born and raised in Louisiana, Shaena brings over 7 years of organizing and advocacy experience to the position as well as her extensive work in the community focusing on issues facing LGBTQ youth in the juvenile justice system.  At the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana and the Louisiana Center for Children's Rights, Shaena investigated conditions of confinement for incarcerated youth and supported defense attorneys with zealous advocacy and investigation for court-involved youth in New Orleans.  In 2013, Shaena became a Brown Boi after completing the Brown Boi Leadership Training Cohort.  

Sean Hill is an Equal Justice Works Fellow 2013, sponsored by Greenberg Traurig LLP. As a fellow at the non-profit Youth Represent, Sean is implementing the Family Stability Project to represent criminal justice involved youth on the Family Court matters that can disrupt family stability and interfere with successful re-entry. This includes representation on child support, child custody, and child visitation matters, as well as in family offense proceedings. Prior to joining the office as an Equal Justice Works fellow, Sean served a year as a staff attorney with Youth Represent through the Irving R. Kaufman Public Interest Fellowship. A 2012 graduate of Harvard Law School, Sean devoted much of his law school career to serving low-income communities of color through various criminal justice, family law, and education law clinics. He has been an active member of the National Conference of Black Lawyers since 2014, and is especially committed to elevating and prioritizing the concerns of LGBTQ individuals in the movement for black lives. 

Miajia R. Jawara  is a 17 year old rising Senior at A. Philip Randolph high school in Harlem, NY. Through a fellowship for high school students, Miajia worked with the Urban Youth Collaborative supporting the development of workshops and campaign actions. She took to the street with thousands of New Yorkers last summer in what was the first of many uprisings across the country. She is passionate about defending, uniting, educating, and uplifting the Black community.

Onyx Walker is a 17 year old senior at the high school for Academy and Innovative Technology in East New York, Brooklyn. He has been a youth organizer with Future of Tomorrow since his junior year. Over the last year, he has stepped up as a leader within Future of Tomorrow and as part of the Urban Youth Collaborative. He has helped to plan and guide UYC campaigns, represented UYC at press conferences demanding an end to the school to prison pipeline, testified for Restorative Justice funding at City Hall hearings, advocated for the Get Us to College campaign with DOE officials, and lead youth development workshops for School Safety Agents and teachers on his high school campus. He plans to continue to organize next year and aspires to inspire his community through his music in the future

Quanita McRoberts is an organizer with Ohio Student Association as well as an elected member of their Steering Committee. She has been involved with #BlackLivesMatter through organizing the Justice For John Crawford III with OSA. She strongly believes in operating from an intersectional view point that examines a person experience at the various intersection of their life.  In addition, Quanita graduated Fall 2014 with a degree in Liberal Studies with a social science concentration as well as two minors in African & African-American Studies, Women Studies, and a certificate in African-American and Gender Experience in Health Care. Much of what Quanita studied influenced and inspired her passion to organize around many social justice issues.

Thena Robinson Mock serves as Project Director of Advancement Project’s Ending the Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track Campaign. She is a civil rights attorney with over a decade of experience in racial and social justice advocacy.  Prior to joining Advancement Project, Thena served as Executive Director of Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools (The Rethinkers), a dynamic youth organizing and leadership development organization that uses participatory education and action research to build organizing and leadership skills of New Orleans youth.

Ahmad Nabil Abuznaid Esq., is a co-founder of the Dream Defenders and currently serving as its Chief Operating Officer while leading in legal/policy matters. The Dream Defenders are an uprising from communities in struggle committed to shifting the culture through transformational organizing.  We are a liberation movement; actively committed to struggling against racial, economic, and sexual oppression.. Ahmad was born in East Jerusalem, Palestine. It was there growing up while living under occupation that he first developed his interest in social justice. Ahmad returned to the US for high school and then attended the Florida State University, where he received his bachelors in International Affairs, with a minor in business in 2006. Ahmad later received his JD from the Florida Coastal School of Law in 2011 while receiving pro-bono honors and interning at the International Criminal Court at the Hague, he is a member in good standing of the Florida bar. In 2014 Ahmad advocated before the United Nations Human Rights Committee in Geneva, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the United States Commission on civil rights, and the Congressional Black Caucus foundation conference. He co-authored an article that was published in the University of Miami Law Review titled: “Stand Your Ground” Laws: International Human Rights Law Implications." Most recently he led the Dream Defenders delegation of black/brown US activists to Palestine.

Adofo Minka is a founding member of Cooperation Jackson, an emerging network of worker-owned cooperative enterprises that is focusing on organizing working class people around building a solidarity economy in Jackson, MS. As a part of his work with Cooperation Jackson he is a lead organizer with an emerging human rights project that the organization has undertaken with a host of other local organizations, the Jackson Human Rights Institute (JHRI). The Focus of the JHRI is developing a Human Rights Charter for the city of Jackson and getting the city to establish a Human Rights Commission through a people centered human rights process that will include mass education, policy development and advocacy. This process will help to ensure that the city protects, respects, and fulfills the basic human rights and dignity of all of its residents. Adofo is also a activist member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement in Jackson, MS.

Amelia Hayes was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. She graduated from Otterbein University, a small liberal arts college in Westerville, Ohio in 2012. She was a legislative aide in the Ohio House of Representatives for over 2 years and recently transitioned into an Outreach Coordinator with Policy Matters Ohio. She is an organizer with the Ohio Student Association and works on issues ranging from racial justice to transit equity to leadership development. She currently lives in Cleveland with her husband and their dog.

As a member of the Organization for Black Struggle (OBS), Bukky Gbadegesin has done communications, economic development, community programming, canvasing campaigns, and united front work for OBS. She is also a core member of the affiliate group Sistahs Talkin' Back (STB) which focuses on violence against women, reproductive justice, and prison-industrial complex.

Edward A. Hailes, Jr., is a seasoned civil rights attorney and an ordained Baptist minister. He serves as Managing Director and General Counsel for Advancement Project, a national policy and legal action group that creates strategies for achieving universal opportunity and a racially just democracy.  Hailes previously directed Advancement Project’s Power and Democracy Program, including coordinating its Voter Protection Program. He also directed the VA Voter Restoration Initiative, which works with VA community partners to eliminate the unjust barriers people with felony convictions face in regaining the right to vote and a voice in our democracy.   

Norris Henderson, current Executive Director of VOTE, a nonprofit organization designed to educate, organize and mobilize formerly incarcerated persons about their right to vote in Louisiana. Norris is a former OSF Soros Justice Fellow who promoted community organizing and advocacy campaigns to transform the criminal justice system in New Orleans to one that is fair, safe and accountable to all citizens regardless of race and economic status. Norris has had tremendous success in his work impacting public policy and public discourse about police accountability, public defense for poor and indigent people, and reforming the notorious Orleans Parish Prison (OPP). As someone who was wrongfully incarcerated for 27 years, Norris shares firsthand experience of racism and brutality of the criminal justice system with communities of color across the city. Self-taught in criminal law during his 27 years in prison as a paralegal, advocate and organizer.

Omar Farah is a Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he specializes in challenging unlawful detentions at Guantánamo prison. Since 2008, he has represented several detainees in habeas corpus litigation in federal court and in resettlement efforts. Beyond his Guantánamo work, Omar focuses on litigation and advocacy in response to abusive counterterrorism practices, including the unlawful surveillance of Muslim American communities. Prior to coming to the Center for Constitutional Rights, he was in private practice, working mostly in the area of international commercial arbitration. Omar has been interviewed on major news outlets, including MSNBC, Al Jazeera, Russia TV and Channel 4 News (UK).  His opinion pieces have appeared in The Huffington Post and The Global Journal among others.  He is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center.

Brendan Roediger is an Associate Professor of Law at St. Louis University and directs the Litigation Clinic, focusing on racial justice, court reform, and representation of low-income individuals in the St. Louis region.  He is a founding member of the Ferguson Legal Defense Committee and works with the Organization for Black Struggle.

Jeena Shah is a Visiting Assistant Clinical Professor of Law at Rutgers School of Law - Newark, where she teaches the Constitutional Rights and International Human Rights Clinics. She is co-lead counsel on a lawsuit brought by Sexual Minorities Uganda, an umbrella organization for LGBTI-led groups in Uganda, against a U.S.-based anti-gay extremist for contributing to the persecution of Uganda's queer community.  She also currently represents four Iraqi men in their lawsuit against a U.S. military contract for torture at Abu Ghraib.  Jeena has worked closely with organizers and oppressed communities in New York, Iraq, India, and Haiti, appeared on TV and radio news programs and authored several op-eds discussing issues of U.S. militarism and imperialism, and co-designed a training on movement lawyering. 

Mr. Pepe Julian Onziema is program director of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), an advocacy network based in Kampala that works to support lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) rights organizations across Uganda. A transgender human rights defender who has been working to strengthen the rights of sexual and gender minorities over the past seven years, Mr. Onziema serves as the LGBTI focal person on the steering committee of the Pan African Human Rights Defenders Network, speaking out on LGBTI issues at the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights and the United Nations Human Rights Council. In 2012, he was awarded the Clinton Global Citizen Award for Leadership in Civil Society for his pioneering work advocating for LGBTI welfare, and also received Stonewall’s “Hero of the Year” award in 2014. During his fellowship, Mr. Onziema is exploring ways in which to increase citizens’ awareness of the Ugandan Constitution and Bill of Rights, with a view to enhancing their participation in democratic governance and respect for all human rights. He plans to work toward this goal by developing a training manual and booklet illustrating the rights of marginalized groups under Uganda’s Constitution, with practical exercises on how specific rights may be claimed and enjoyed.