The Equal Justice Society celebrates Women’s History Month sharing the role of women leaders in founding our organization and how our continued focus on issues impacting women, and Black women in particular, is helping advance the racial justice movement.
EJS’s founders were mostly women: Eva Paterson (our inaugural President), Abim Thomas, Susan Serrano, Carrie Avery, Sheila Thomas, Michelle Alexander, Joan Graff, Margaret Russell, Margalynne Armstrong, Shauna Marshall, Angela Harris, Stephanie Wildman, Cheryl Stevens, April Williams, Norm Spaulding, and H. Jesse Arnelle.
One of our co-founders was Michelle Alexander, author of the New Jim Crow. She was at one of EJS’s first conferences in 2003 called “Colorblind Racism!” as a speaker on a panel on implicit bias, a largely unknown subject then. Eva Paterson recounted the “profound, emotional reaction in the crowd. There were about 400 people there. People were weeping because for the first time, they could be engaged in a conversation about race where we weren’t calling them racist.”
This was the beginning of EJS’s work on implicit bias, primarily at the intersection of the law and social science. It remains one of our key focus areas today.
We’re also proud that the current EJS staff is mostly women (7 out of 8 employees) and that we started and continue today as a Black women-led organization. Women play a critical role in the fight for equity and justice. We served and serve as leaders of diverse movements and reach across silos even as we face discrimination, doubly so when we are BIPOC.
Keith Kamisugi 