LDF News and Media Today:

A sampling of Race, Justice, Equality and Democracy in the news.

CBA Young Lawyers Section to Honor Sheff v. O’Neill Plaintiffs’ Counsel at Fifth Annual Diversity Award Dinner

Matthew Colangelo is the director of the Economic Justice Group for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund (LDF). In that capacity, Colangelo manages LDF’s litigation in the areas of employment discrimination, housing discrimination, environmental racism and fair lending. Before joining LDF’s staff as a Skadden Fellow in 2003, he served as a law clerk to then-Judge Sonia Sotomayor on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Disruptive speech to be panel’s topic at PVCC discussion

Elaine Jones, retired director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund;

Stanford Law School Honors Public Interest Attorneys Debo P. Adegbile and Corene Kendrick With Public Interest Awards
The John and Terry Levin Center for Public Service and Public Interest Law at Stanford Law School has awarded the National Public Service Award to Debo P. Adegbile for his work on voting rights and the Miles L. Rubin Public Interest Award to Corene Kendrick `03 for her advocacy of children`s rights. Both recipients were honored last night at a ceremony on the Stanford campus.

Civil Rights Groups Push for Public Option
The N.A.A.C.P. and more than 50 other civil rights groups plan to unveil a “war room’’ in Washington
on Thursday to push for the so-called public option, or government-run health plan.

The real obstacle to voting representation for D.C.
The Oct. 29 editorial ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/28/AR2009102804142.html ) “The Democrats’ dodge on voting rights” was absolutely correct in pointing out that the debate over D.C. voting rights “isn’t being seen as the civil rights issue that it is,” and further, that congressional leaders are not “pressing members to put principle ahead of political interests.”

Florida AG: Make licensing for felons tougher

Attorney General Bill McCollum urged Florida lawmakers Tuesday to make it tougher for former felons to get occupational licenses for jobs involving children, seniors and disabled people.

Clippers Owner to Pay Record $2.7 Million to Settle Suit
Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald T. Sterling has agreed to pay nearly $2.7million to settle a housing discrimination lawsuit, the Justice Department announced today. That amount represents the “largest monetary payment ever obtained by the department in the settlement of a case alleging housing discrimination in the rental of apartments” according to a Justice Department statement.

The Year of Living Postracially

ONE year ago today, we officially became a postracial society. Fifty-three percent of the voters opted for the candidate who would be the first president of African descent, and in doing so eradicated racism forever.
IN the year since his election, as he has since he first appeared on the national stage, Barack Obama has embodied the fundamental paradoxes of race in America: that we live in a still racially fragmented society; that we share a public culture with an outsized black presence, but that in the privacy of homes and neighborhoods we are more segregated than in the Jim Crow era; that we worship more fervently than any other advanced nation, in churches and synagogues that define our separate ethnic identities and differences, to gods proclaiming the unity of mankind.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/opinion/04patterson.html?ref=opinion