Rev. Darrell Armstrong is pastor of historic Shiloh Baptist Church in Trenton, NJ - its third pastor in the last 100 years. He is the founder and Board Chair of the National Association of Foster Children, Inc. and is a member of the NJ Governor's Cabinet for Children. He chairs the Social Concerns Committee of the General Baptist Convention of NJ Supreme Court Committee on Minority Concerns. He is a trustee of the College of New Jersey. He holds a BA in Public Policy from Stanford and a Masters in Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary.

John Charles Boger is Deputy Director of the UNC Center for Civil Rights and Wade Edwards Professor at the Univ. of North Carolina Law School. His undergraduate degree is from Duke, and 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

Victor Bolden is General Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund. In addition to advising LDF on its internal legal matters, he has responsibility for shaping the organization's affirmative action agenda. Mr. Bolden was Counsel with the law firm of Wiggin and Dana LLP in New Haven , Connecticut . Victor also served as a Karpatkin Fellow and Staff Attorney at the ACLU , from 1989-1994.

Maria Blanco is Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. From 1999 to 2003 she was National Senior Counsel and Regional Counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. She served on boards for the Hispanic National Bar Association, Bar Association of San Francisco, California Rural Legal Assistance, Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights, and La Clinica de la Raza. She co-authored several publications including Guidebook to California Employee Rights ( Golden Gate University Press) and Used and Abused: The Treatment of Undocumented Victims of Labor Law Violations Since Hoffman Plastic Compounds v. NLRB (Vol. 8, No.10.). Ms. Blanco was awarded the League of Women Voters Women Who Could be President Award, American Jewish Congress Mensches in the Trenches Award, San Francisco La Raza Lawyers Association Unity Award, MALDEF’s Legal Services Award, and NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Award.

Sheila Crowley is president/chief executive officer of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Washington, DC, the country's principal policy/lobbying group on issues of housing low-income and minority households. A social worker by training, she directed for 8 years The Daily Planet, a homeless services center in Richmond, VA, taught at the Virginia Commonwealth Univ. School of Social Work, and was a Congressional Fellow on the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Housing. She serves on the boards of the National Housing Trust, the Alliance for Healthy Homes, the National Housing Conference and the Technical Assistance Collaborative.

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.

Thomas Henderson is a partner in the Washington D.C. office of Sprenger & Lang, a firm specializing in class action civil rights and related litigation. His BA is from the College of Wooster, his law degree from the Univ. of Pittsburgh. Prior to joining Sprenger & Lang, he was Chief Counsel for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, had a private civil rights practice in Pittsburgh, PA, was Adjunct Professor at the Univ. of Pittsburgh School of Law and began his career as a Staff Attorney at Neighborhood Legal Services Assn. in Pittsburgh. Tom has more than 25 years of experience in class action litigation in housing and employment discrimination, environmental justice, education and voting rights, and he has testified before both Houses of Congress and advocated civil rights policy to federal agencies and officials. www.sprengerlang.com

Camille Holmes is Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Law & Social Policy in Washington, DC and 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. Prior to coming to CLASP, she was Executive Director of the Southern Africa Legal Service & Legal Education Project. She is the immediate past Board President of the Washington Council of Lawyers, a voluntary bar association promoting pro bono and public interest law. A graduate of Harvard/Radcliffe Colleges and the Harvard Law School, she then clerked for Sixth Circuit Judge Damon Keith.

Elizabeth (Betsy) Julian is returning to the PRRAC Board, on which she served from 1990 to 1994, when she was appointed 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. She currently has a Dallas-based practice as a fair housing and community planning consultant, having spent the previous two years as HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo's Representative for the Southwest Region, overseeing the department's operations in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Louisiana and Arkansas. 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 currently a scholar in residence at the Columbia Law School, serving as the Kellis Parker Fellow in Law. 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.

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 is 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 Institute on Race & Poverty at the Univ. of Minnesota. 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.  www.umn.edu/ird

Florence Wagman Roisman is Michael D. McCormick Professor of Law at Indiana Univ. School of Law-Indianapolis. For over three decades she worked with the Legal Services program, primarily with the National Housing Law Project. She focuses on issues involving housing discrimination and segregation.

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. 

Cathi 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

William L. Taylor is an attorney practicing in Washington, DC, who specializes in representing minority and low-income children in litigation seeking equal educational opportunity, work that has achieved major school integration victories in Wilmington, Indianapolis, Ft. Wayne, Cincinnati and St. Louis. He is Vice-Chair of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and of the Citizens Commission on Civil Rights. He is a graduate of Brooklyn College and Yale Law School. He began his legal career as a Staff Attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund and in the 1960s served as General Counsel and later Staff Director of the US Civil Rights Commission. He founded and for 16 years directed the Center for National Policy Review, a civil rights and advocacy organization housed at Catholic Univ., where he taught civil rights law. His memoir, "The Passion of My Times," was published by Carroll and Graf in 2004.