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| Affiliation | Revolutionary Workers |
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| Name | Shanta Driver |
| Address |
Detroit, Michigan , United States |
| Email | None |
| Website | None |
| Born |
Unknown |
| Died |
Still Living
(2025 years) |
| Contributor | RBH |
| Last Modifed | Zeus the Moose
Aug 26, 2009 03:09pm |
| Tags |
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| Info | Shanta Driver has been organizing for civil rights for nearly 30 years. She received her undergraduate degree in Psychology and Social Relations from Harvard, and her Juris Doctor degree from Wayne State University Law School. Ms. Driver is currently an attorney at Scheff and Washington, a leading Detroit civil rights and labor law firm.
Ms. Driver is the National Co-Chair for the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) and the National Director of BAMN's non-profit affiliate, United for Equality and Affirmative Action Legal Defense Fund (UEAALDF). Ms. Driver was the legal architect of the successful student intervention into Grutter v Bollinger, the University of Michigan Law School affirmative action case. Relying on many of the arguments presented by the student defendants, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a historic victory for affirmative action and integration, ruled to uphold affirmative action at the University of Michigan Law School.
BAMN spearheaded the organizing of the 50,000-person March on Washington to Defend Affirmative Action and Save Brown v Board of Education on April 1, 2003 which played a key role in the Grutter victory.
Under Ms. Driver's leadership, BAMN prevented black republican businessman Ward Connerly, from placing an anti-affirmative action initiative on the Michigan ballot in November 2004. In 2006, Connerly's organization, the so-called 'Michigan Civil Rights Initiative' (MCRI), succeeded in getting on the ballot despite BAMN's exposure of the systematic, racially-targeted voter fraud used by MCRI to obtain its place on the ballot. Ms. Driver is one of BAMN's attorneys for two legal challenges pending against MCRI, now known as Proposal 2. One of the lawsuits, which is clearly Supreme Court-bound, challenges the constitutionality of any ban on affirmative action and stands a good chance of overturning not only Proposal 2, but also Proposal 209 in California and I-200 in Washington State.
UEAALDF is an intervenor-defendant in defense of the Los Angeles voluntary desegregation program that has been challenged by Ward Connerly. UEAALDF and BAMN filed an amicus brief in the Louisville and Seattle K-12 desegregation cases that are now before the U.S. Supreme Court, and BAMN organized thousands of students to march on the Supreme Court on December 4, 2006 when oral arguments were heard in those cases.
Under Ms. Driver's dynamic leadership, BAMN has also become a leader of the movement for immigrant rights that burst into the streets in the Spring of 2006 with student walkouts and mass demonstrations demanding equal rights for all who live and work in the United States.
BAMN led a successful drive in the fall of 2004 to make Detroit the first and only city in the nation to overturn a state or mayoral takeover of its school board. This effort was part of BAMN's broader perspective of fighting for equal, quality education for all and defending public schools against attempts to privatize and degrade public education through cutbacks and layoffs, charters, vouchers and subcontracting.
Ms. Driver spends much of her time criss-crossing the country speaking on the contemporary challenges to civil rights and inspiring people to become active in their defense. Included among her many speaking engagements are: The U.S. Department of Transportation; the A. Phillip Randolph Institute; Rainbow/PUSH Coalition; NAACP National Convention; Tavis Smiley Foundation Youth2Leaders Conference; National Bar Association; American Sociological Association; Americans for Democratic Action; the Progressive National Baptist Convention; the National Organization for Women; American Association for Affirmative Action; Society of American Law Teachers and hundreds of colleges, high schools, churches and unions.
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