Career of Building Bridges for a Just Community

Justice Anita Earl’s decisions to focus on civil rights issues were shaped by her own experiences growing up. Justice Anita Earls and her brother were adopted by an interracial couple, who were forced to move to Washington State from Missouri because the state banned interracial marriage. She shared that her white mother worked at night as a nurse and her father was a black urological technician, who was paid less for the same work as his white co-workers. The family lived for a few years in a predominantly black neighborhood and then moved to a white neighborhood, where she felt unwelcome and wary. She went to Williams College, where she majored in Political Economy & Philosophy. After finishing Yale Law School, she worked for a private firm on wrongful death cases involving the police killing of people of color in North Carolina. Then, President Clinton appointed her to be a Deputy Assistant Attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where she supervised Federal enforcement of laws against discrimination in education, employment and housing. She next served as Director of the Voting Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. In 2007, Earls founded and served as Executive Director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a North Carolina based civil rights non-profit organization to defend and advance the political, social and economic rights of communities of color and economically disadvantaged communities in the south. In 2018, Earls was elected to the North Carolina Supreme Court, where she works to protect the rights and freedoms of all North Carolinians, assuring equal access to healthcare, public education, a clean environment and right to vote.