Shanta Driver earned
a bachelor's degree in psychology and social relations from Harvard
University in 1975, and a J.D. from Wayne State University Law School
in 2002. She is currently an attorney at Scheff, Washington &
Driver, a Detroit-based civil-rights and labor law firm.
Reasoning
from the premise
that America is a profoundly racist nation, Driver passionately
supports affirmative action as a necessary safeguard against
discrimination targeting nonwhites in the workplace and academia. In
2008 she told an interviewer on National Public Radio that it was the
“aim
and intent” of Ward Connerly, the former University of
California Regent who had led the fight to eliminate public-sector
racial preferences in several states, to “resegregate higher
education” by “driv[ing] black and Latino students ... off of
campuses across this country.”
Driver is
the national chair for the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action,
Integration & Immigrant Rights; the founder and national chair of
By Any Means Necessary (BAMN); and the national director of BAMN’s
nonprofit affiliate, the United for Equality and Affirmative Action
Legal Defense Fund. She was
instrumental in organizing a 50,000-person “March on
Washington to Defend Affirmative Action,” which took place on April
1, 2003. In addition, Driver was the legal
architect of a student intervention into Grutter v. Bollinger,
the University of Michigan Law School affirmative-action case where
the Supreme Court ruled, in June 2003, that while hard, race-based
quotas were impermissible, the “use of race in admissions decisions
to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational
benefits that flow from a diverse student body” was a legitimate
practice.
More recently, Driver headed
up the legal team challenging the constitutionality of state bans
on affirmative action in Michigan (BAMN v. Granholm,
2007) and California (BAMN v. Schwarzenegger, 2010).
Also under Driver’s leadership, BAMN
helped
organize the massive wave of immigrant-rights rallies that swept
across the United States in the spring of 2006.
In 2011, Driver's law firm
filed a suit that was successful in striking down the Michigan Civil Rights
Initiative of 2006 (a.k.a. Proposal 2), which had banned the use of race and gender preferences in college admissions and in government hiring and contracting.
Since the mid-1990s, Driver has
been a guest speaker—chiefly on the subject of affirmative action—at hundreds of colleges and universities nationwide. She
also has addressed
scores of civil-rights, professional, religious, political, and
governmental organizations, including the Congressional Black Caucus
Foundation, the National Alliance of Black School Educators, the U.S.
Department of Transportation, the Missouri Department of Natural
Resources, the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the NAACP National Convention,
the Tavis Smiley Foundation Youth2Leaders Conference, the National
Bar Association, the American Sociological Association, Americans for
Democratic Action, the Progressive National Baptist Convention, the
National Organization for Women, and the Society of American Law
Teachers.
Among the numerous
awards Driver has received during her career as an activist are the American Association for Affirmative Action
Rosa Parks Award, the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth Humanitarian
Award, the National Society of Black Engineers “Fulfilling the
Vision of Tomorrow” Award, and the National Lawyers Guild-Detroit
Unsung Hero Award.
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