Overview
- The NAACP, which announced the hire Wednesday, said Clarke will lead cases on voter access, gerrymandering and First Amendment claims, and she will keep her professorship at Howard University School of Law.
- Clarke previously ran the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, where she pursued police reform cases in Minneapolis and Louisville and helped prosecute the 2022 Buffalo supermarket mass shooting as a hate crime.
- NAACP leaders cast the move as expanding legal firepower to counter what they call growing attacks on voting rights, including recent efforts to require proof of citizenship for voter registration that a judge blocked last year.
- The civil rights group has active lawsuits challenging new congressional maps in North Carolina and Texas and a separate case alleging Virginia officials disenfranchised student voters.
- The timing comes as the DOJ Civil Rights Division under Harmeet Dhillon has been cut back and refocused on conservative priorities, according to CNN and Reuters, while a conservative outlet, the Daily Signal, criticized Clarke as using civil rights law against the right.