Dennis Parker

Director of the ACLU National Office's Racial Justice Program at Teachers College Columbia University

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  • Teachers College Columbia University

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Teachers College Columbia University

Dennis D. Parker, J.D., is the Director of the ACLU National Office's Racial Justice Program, where he coordinates the racial justice work done by the ACLU's national office and its affiliates. He has testified before the United Nations Forum on Minority Issues: Minorities and the Right to Education and appeared in the African American Policy Forum series: 13 Myths About Affirmative Action. Parker’s work with the ACLU has brought needed attention to the school-to-prison-pipeline tracking many of young Black and Latino students from the principal’s office to the nation’s expanding prison industrial complex. 

Prior to joining the ACLU, Parker was the Chief of the Civil Rights Bureau in the Office of New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer where he oversaw the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws in housing, employment, voting, public accommodations and credit. He spent 14 years at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, where he supervised the litigation of scores of cases throughout the country in matters involving elementary and secondary education, affirmative action in higher education and equal educational opportunity.  

Parker has also worked with the New York Legal Aid Society. He has numerous publications on housing discrimination, educational equity, affirmative action, and testing, and has served as an adjunct professor at New York Law School. He is the author of the 1993 edition of the Fair Housing Litigation Handbook, and he wrote a chapter in this year's Awakening from the Dream: Civil Rights Under Siege and the New Struggle for Equal Justice. He lectures on Race, Poverty and Constitutional Law at Columbia University's School Law Institute and is an adjunct professor at New York Law School. He is a graduate of Middlebury College and Harvard Law School.

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