 We are fortunate to have with us Catherine Lehmann, my dear friend and chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Catherine has in addition to chairing the Commission been litigating civil rights cases at the National Center for Youth Law where she's been of counsel since October of 2017. Before coming to the Commission Catherine served as Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education until January of 2017. Before that she was a leader in the ACLU in California litigating school equity issues and cases and generating an unbelievably creative set of ideas for how we can move the equity ball forward. She received her JD from Yale Law School where she was the outstanding woman law graduate. She graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College. She credited her parents for her choice of careers. They were civil rights activists who inspired her to attend law school because she knew she wanted to make a difference. When one of her daughters was four when she heard her teacher talk about Martin Luther King Jr. she told her classrooms my mom does that. It's a pretty good thing to be known by your children for doing. She was Assistant Secretary for the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights at the time. When she took on that job she called the post her fantasy job and she made more amazing strong and creative gains in that post than one would think possible in the time that she served. Dealing with issues of civil rights, data accessibility, issues of exclusion from school, allocation of resources, segregation, Title IX. She left an amazing legacy that we really need to protect in the coming months and years. In 2004, California Lawyer Magazine named Katherine Lehman Attorney of the Year for Civil Rights. In 2007, the Daily Journal named her one of California's top lawyers under 40. The Chronicle of Higher Education named Katherine to their influence list in 2014 and labeled her the enforcer which is for those of us who know this brilliant and charming leader we might not think of her first in those terms but make no mistake this is one tough determined and effective leader on behalf of us all we're delighted to welcome Katherine Lehman. Thank you for that lovely and embarrassing introduction and thank you to you and to Dr. Curtis for inviting me and thank you all for being here and for the inspiration and the hope that it gives me to see you all together for increasing equity in our communities today and every day. It was amazing for all of us to hear our previous speaker survival do my best to talk about the ways that I as a federal official am trying to live up to your dream and to Dr. King's dream and talk about what I think it is all of us need to do to make sure that we can give life to what the current commission promised us as a nation 50 years ago and what Congress and we as a country have together promised ourselves repeatedly over those 50 years. The commission that I chair the US Commission on Civil Rights like the current commission was formed when we as a nation decided that we needed to come together to make real our equity promises and the charge of the US Commission on Civil Rights is as the current commission's charge was to evaluate the status of equity the status of civil rights across all dimensions in this country and to make policy recommendations for what it is that we ought to do as a country for effective federal civil rights policy. I will surely not surprise you that the commission's earliest recommendations were parallel to those from the current commission and the commission's latest recommendations are parallel to those that are in this 50 year update report that is both comforting to me and that we are like-minded about what our equity principles are and enormously depressing that over these 50 years in the life of both commissions 60 years in the life of the US Commission on Civil Rights we are effectively talking about the same things we are effectively saying that we need this new will that we need actually to make real our equity promises and so I wholeheartedly support your endeavor and want to share with you both what it is that I see now in my perch at the commission as the status of equity in this country and what it is that I hope we together can do. A central conclusion of the current commission was that we are a national community responsible for each other and that there is an essential federal role for sustaining that responsibility. We have struggled as we know to live up to the call of the current commission over these 50 years but one core precept that has sustained over all of that time has been a belief in the federal civil rights promise and the obligation of the federal government to ensure those federal civil rights promises. Congress has passed many additional civil rights laws in the life of the time of the 50 years since the current commission and we have held fast to that fundamental core conclusion that the promise of equity is a promise worth striving for that set of basic precepts that that promise of equity is worth striving for is tested more now than ever in these 50 years and that is scary to me dangerous for all of us and worth our coming together now to work hard to course correct the the Trump administration fundamentally rejects the role of federal government in acting as a backstop against harm for all Americans. It takes a position over and over again that equity and civil rights issues are local issues to be decided without federal action. We in this room know that that is a failed policy position. We in this room know that the reason the current commission called for a new will to act was precisely because the vagaries of local decision making leave Americans vulnerable to harm lead to inequity. We also know that we have seen other times since the corner commission when presidential administrations and Congress tested our equity ideals. Speaking for myself I think of the Reagan administration as the nader for civil rights before now but what worries me now is that this Trump administration is taking a page from the Reagan playbook and accelerating it that scares me frankly and that is what I think needs to drive all of us for a meaningful call to action. This administration works to destabilize the federal judiciary appointing judges who are affirmatively opposed to federal civil rights enforcement and to federal civil rights themselves. This administration issues speech after speech and tweet after tweet challenging equity principles and announcing that the administration will not enforce them. This administration generates dangerous policy and regulatory limitations on our rights. As I'll discuss in a moment I am worried about our national health therefore and I'm deeply grateful to you all for reaffirming your commitment to equity principles but as much as I want to share with you the urgency of these times and I know that you all know it and that's why you came together. I also want to confirm that losing hope is not a viable option. I want to say it again losing hope is not a viable option. It is it is true as Thomas Jefferson is famous for having said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance so what that truism means is that equity is not a destination to be reached and to walk away from because we can check that box and we've gotten there. It is true for us that living equity at the desktop for students in housing and workplace for adults and criminal justice for all of us means nurturing that equity means working to sustain its aspirational ideals and struggling constantly to maintain them in all of our lives. We do not get to walk away we cannot ever walk away that is frustrating to know it is frustrating to recognize and it means we have to come together we have to stay with the fight because some progress is better than no progress. I agree that we have not done and achieved as much as we should have we are not yet at Dr. King's mountaintop and I didn't ride the back of the bus that my mother rode. I can try hat on in an apartment store that my mother never could. I don't drink from colored water fountains that my mother drank from. We have made some progress it's not enough it's appallingly too little and it's better than not having made any and if we hadn't been in this fight if we hadn't been working to sustain those promises we would not have achieved what we have achieved yet and it would be worse. So it is worth staying with this fight and we have to we can do it together. Having said that piece about the importance thank you. I want to also just talk about what I see now in my role at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights what it is that we're seeing the commission is charged with being the nation's eyes and ears with respect to civil rights and to report back about what the nation reports to us about the status of civil rights enforcement. So here are some of our recent conclusions and developments most recently we should report just last month about school finance inequity in an era of increasing concentration of poverty and resegregation that set of conclusions will be very familiar to all of you and enormously distressing the commission majority in that report concluded that across the nation public schools generally struggle to provide equality education on equal terms because they lack sufficient financial resources. We found that the reality of American schooling is fundamentally inconsistent with the American ideal of public education operating as a means to equalize life opportunity regardless of zip code race economic status or life circumstance. The headlines the same month that we issued that report and generated those findings included reports from Baltimore about children literally freezing in classrooms because the heat didn't work over and over again in those classrooms. The Baltimore superintendent said I thought accurately and devastating quote we all knew state new district new city new we've had numerous reports that have talked about the age of buildings we frankly had the blessing of really warm winters but now under pressure of extended cold the chickens are coming home to roost that is so devastating the accurate and not at all limited to Baltimore. We all knew we knew that those children were subject to harm but we didn't have the collective will to take action that would make sure that no child in this country has to sit in a classroom freezing when that child is required to be at school trying to learn those Baltimore children are very like Detroit children are very like children in San Francisco in litigation that Sophie Finnelli who's here in this room with me and I litigated many many years ago who lacked decent school facilities. Those are those are the perpetual conditions of learning in close to a third of American public school students educational experience. That is not the way you would treat any child you hated much less the child that you love the child that you believe has an opportunity and can become his and her dreams. So the reality is that in any week in any school in any year we know that we don't deliver educational opportunity and that we mandate that those children be in school without educational opportunity which means that we are sending them a message that their government does not believe in them does not expect them to succeed and views them as disposable. That is dangerous that is distressing that is totally anathema to who we say we will be and we ought to change it. It is also the core reality that our schools are profoundly segregated profoundly segregated. What we have determined is that approximately 77 percent of Latino students and 73 percent of black students attend schools that are majority students of color and that compares to approximately 88 percent of white students who attend schools that are at least half white. So all of these years after Brown versus Board of Education we continue to operate profoundly unequal educational systems in terms of the opportunities that we deliver in those systems in terms of who sits next to each other in those systems and in terms of what we communicate about belief in our students. The Commission called for Congress finally to act. There have been many many many years of calling on states to correct these harms. We at the Commission majority said look let's make education a fundamental right that is federal. Let's give each child a right to be in federal court to enforce that right if his and her school won't do it for them. In addition we asked Congress to provide sufficient funds and to use its federal influence to incent greater equality in schools. I am confident that Congress is imminently going to act on those recommendations. But I do think it would help if you all were persistent in your efforts also to to influence the the degree to which Congress is hearing those recommendations. In addition to who sits next to whom in school and how much money we spend for whom in school. The Commission recently in December held a briefing related to the school to prison pipeline focused on discipline of students of color with disabilities in school. That is a topic with which I am painfully familiar from my life at the Department of Education before coming is also a topic with which I am painfully familiar in my life at the National Center for Youth Law where my colleagues have been litigating and have been doing aggressive work in this area for quite some time. It is also painfully resonant across all of the years of the desegregation promises that we have held ourselves to loosely in schools. The very first desegregation agreements that the Federal Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Education enforced with school districts around the country included discipline as a topic for the core desegregation principle. That is to say that as early as the middle 1960s we were saying we need to not discipline students of color differently and more aggressively than we discipline white students in schools and still we're still in a conversation about whether that is something that is acceptable to us as a country whether that is something that that we will let continue. What we heard at the Commission were devastating stories about children who are subject to exclusionary school discipline who are subject to discipline that is apparent to their families, apparent to them as focused on denigrating belief in who they are based on their skin color and based on their disability as distinct from meeting out appropriate classroom supports for all students to make sure that they can learn effectively. So I look forward to what the Commission will say about that topic. I am certain that our recommendations will include suggestions for ways to include to ensure equitable opportunity in schools and I am pleased that we at the Commission can shine a spotlight on that topic among so many others that are core to civil rights. Like the Kerner Commission the US Commission on civil rights has been looking at the ways that our cities respond to Americans and the ways that in particular our police institutions respond to Americans. I want to tell you about a few of those reports as well. Last fall the Commission released a report about cities imposing fines and fees on residents. We think of that as cash register justice meaning that our cities are funding themselves through the lowest income residents in the cities and often through the lowest income residents who are of color in the cities imposing dollar fines, dollar fees on them for criminal activities in excess of the criminal punishment and for civil penalties well in excess of persons actual ability to pay. The investigation confirmed at least an excess between race and that cash register justice similar to the Department of Justice findings from investigating Ferguson, Missouri after the tragic death of Michael Brown three years ago. The reality is that the country was horrified when we learned about what happened to Michael Brown and what we learned about what the Department of Justice saw when it did its investigation of Ferguson, Missouri and I think we hoped that we would not be like that community that we would not treat our people the way that Michael Brown was treated the way that Ferguson, Missouri was treating in particular people of color. What we learned in the commission's investigation is that more than half of our states have taken very little action at all to correct their behavior with respect to fines and fees even following the notoriety and the public outrage following Ferguson, Missouri. Five states have taken no action at all and what we see is that that unchecked discretion for cities to be able to fund themselves to be able to operate the way that they elect to operate based on this cash register justice is profoundly harmful to low-income Americans. A 2017 survey found that almost 60 percent of Americans do not have enough money and savings to cover a $500 emergency and fines and fees often exceed that amount. So we know that low-income families, low-income persons in this country do not have capacity to pay those fees and yet we impose them and yet we then criminalize behavior that isn't criminal and we reverse the trajectory of otherwise productive lives in ways that are enormously, enormously damaging. In addition to looking at this question of the ways that our cities are praying on their own, with the commission recently held a briefing about the collateral consequences of incarceration and those are the legal and non-legal impacts that accompany a criminal conviction and we are still working the staff at the commission are still working on drawing conclusions from that briefing but here are some of the key takeaways for me. There are significant impacts on marginalized communities from these collateral consequences that that affect people of color, affect women, LGBT persons, people with disabilities. We heard devastating testimony about how unlikely employers are to hire job seekers who have been incarcerated. We heard about bans on access to public benefits as a consequence of incarceration, a former incarceration, communicating a particular animus about which women are worthy of support and which women are not and also rendering families unable to eat and there is, we learned in our testimony that came to us, we learned that there's a weak relationship between the consequences imposed and actually deterring crime which ought to be the focus of criminal justice. For just one example, access to a driver's license is very often removed as a consequence of criminal incarceration, whether or not that driver's license is in any way related to the crime for which a person was convicted. There is, by contrast, a very strong relationship to harm to the persons affected in being able to become employed, being able to access housing, being able to sustain a viable life following incarceration and non-reentry. So I look forward to what we will say about that but I know that the information that we took in resonates with what it is that the corner commission has evaluated originally and in this update. We also know that loss of voting rights is a very common consequence of incarceration. In just last month, the commission traveled to North Carolina to hear experts discuss the status of voting rights in America and we heard testimony regarding present day impediments to access to the polls that are the core of why the US commission on civil rights exists but also the core of whom we are as a democracy, being able to vote, being able to participate in democracy is the essential way to know that you count as an American and so to hear that you don't and you can't participate and that that is still a core concern for us is enormously devastating to me. In May, the commission will hold a briefing focused on hate incidents, hate crimes in this country and federal enforcement with respect to hate incidents both in the criminal context and also in schools and racially, sexually, disability-based hostile environments perpetuating in schools. And I know that recent data confirms an uptick in hate incidents around the country both in our schools and in our communities. In general, these incidents were, of course, the genesis for the current commission in the first place. They are the reason that the current commission came together to evaluate the United States and to take steps in what was then seen as extraordinarily dangerous times. We are back in those extraordinarily dangerous times, certainly Charlottesville was a public and visible reminder to all of us of how dangerous these times are, but the reality is that Charlottesville is unfortunately not aberrant, not alone, not by itself in what we see in schools. I expect that we will hear recommendations and also the experience of Americans about their conditions in school, their conditions out of school in the ways that this uptick in hate incidents is affecting them. I will say that as a mom of two little girls, the day after the 2016 election, the school community, my children's school community was already aware that it needed to be able to communicate that all children would be welcome there. My daughter's school had signs posted that after the election saying you were loved, you're welcome here, this is a community that will welcome you all. I am so, so grateful that those signs were there and I hate that they needed to be there and that my daughters needed to see them and that their school communities needed them. So I think, I think these are dangerous times. I think these are worrisome times and I know that we can do better. I know that those educators the day after the election had that dangerous and scary moment for the children, my children's school, they were ready. They were ready to be there to make sure that those kids would be safe and that they would be welcomed. And we need to do that in our schools, in our neighborhoods, in all of our communities around the country. We need to be ready. We need to be able to say that the progress that we have made was insufficient but we're holding it and we're going to do substantially more than we have done to date. That's why I do this work and I know it's why you all came together. So I'm relying on you and I'm looking forward to the ways that we will do it together. I have now fewer than five minutes so I'm going to speed up with my thoughts about what it is we can do to make sure that we sustain this energy. At the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, we are using every tool at our disposal to make sure that we live up to the Congressional promise that we will be there for civil rights for America. That means that we call public attention to the issues, through the briefings that I described, through public comment, through statements, through speeches like this one, and we also issue our reports and recommendations to try to draw attention to what ought to happen and what we need as a country. We have state advisory committees in all of our states so we are hearing more locally from people in those advisory committees about their expertise and about the conditions that are of concern to them and we sustain a very broad area of focus across all of the civil rights issues I described to you and many more and that is to make sure that we do not turn our back on any component of civil rights that can affect Americans. We do see concrete effects of these tools. I made a joke about how quickly I think Congress will act on our recommendations. That was gallows humor. It's not actually funny. I do think that Congress should act right away. I will say that Congress has all of the federal civil rights laws that have been enacted in the 60 years of the life of the commission have been influenced by commission recommendations and I am very, very proud of what it is the Congress has done to respond to the commission's recommendations. Not always immediately but certainly effectively over that time. We also are seeing concrete effects more locally and with more speed. So after the commission issued a statement condemning the hate incidents in Charlottesville in May 2017, the city of Denver, Colorado passed a hate crimes law adding sentencing enhancement for bias motivated offenses and they said it was explicitly in response to the call for action from the commission. So I am grateful to know that that happened. The UN working group on arbitrary detention presented a report on immigration detention that responded to immigration detention recommendations from the commission. So I do know internationally, locally and in Congress. We do see response and I say that to say, don't lose hope. What you stand for, the sunlight you draw on issues, the policy advocacy that you do on issues, the standing for a child who needs you, who doesn't necessarily tell you that he or she appreciates it. It's worth it and there are ripple effects of those actions and I ask you please to continue them. I hope very much that every person here today will like us at the commission. Use every tool in your arsenal to stand for civil rights. Taking up that mantle of the new will that the Kerner commission called for is our highest charge as a nation and from my perch at the commission I cannot impress on you enough how desperately we need you to do it. We today stand at the precipice between whom we promised we would be at our nation's founding and to whom we formally recommitted ourselves each time we enacted civil rights laws over these past 50 years and the direct we could become. If we turn our back on equity's promise so let's don't be direct. Let's do the right thing and I'm looking forward to doing it together. Thank you very much.