Shanta Driver
UEAALDF National Director

UEAALDF's National Director, Shanta Driver, has been organizing for civil rights for the last 25 years. She graduated in Psychology and Social Relations from Harvard in 1975, and graduated from Wayne State University Law School in 2002. Ms. Driver is currently an attorney at Scheff and Washington, a leading Detroit civil rights and labor law firm.
      Ms. Driver directed the successful student-intervenor defense in Grutter v Bollinger, the University of Michigan Law School affirmative action case. Relying on many of the arguments presented by the student defendants, the Supreme Court, in a historic victory for affirmative action and integration, ruled to uphold affirmative action at the University of Michigan Law School. Building on the recent Supreme Court victory, UEAALDF is now developing a legal challenge to California’s anti-affirmative action constitutional amendment, Proposition 209, while preparing challenges to Ward Connerly’s campaign to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision through state ballot initiatives.
      Ms. Driver is also the national spokesperson for the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action and Integration and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN). BAMN spearheaded the organizing of the 50,000 person March on Washington to Defend Affirmative Action and Save Brown v Board of Education on April 1, 2003. This march was the most integrated march ever in the history of this nation. BAMN is currently organizing a national campaign to defeat Ward Connerly’s attempt to reverse the civil rights movement’s victory in Grutter v Bollinger.
 

Miranda Massie
Lead Attorney for Student Defendants in Grutter v. Bollinger

      Miranda Massie is a civil rights attorney at Scheff & Washington PC in Detroit, Michigan, a civil rights and union law firm. She was lead counsel for the student intervenors in Grutter v. Bollinger, the nationally prominent University of Michigan Law School affirmative action case that was decided by the United States Supreme Court in the Spring of 2003. The intervenors were 41 black, Latino, Asian-American, white, and other students and three coalitions. They intervened to argue that affirmative action is necessary for progress toward equality and integration, and to link the litigation to the growing new civil rights movement. The intervenors’ legal case, which featured testimony from experts such as John Hope Franklin, Gary Orfield, and Walter Allen, received wide attention and has been the subject of an academic conference and a special issue of the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal as well as numerous press reports.
      Ms. Massie has been an active force in organizing efforts for civil and reproductive rights, for educational equity, and for affirmative action throughout her career. Ms. Massie has spoken at campuses across the country and her work has been the subject of numerous press features and interviews, including in the New York Times, on CNN, and on CBS News Radio. She has been invited to speak about integration and affirmative action in education at annual national conferences of the National Bar Association, the American Sociological Association, the Education Writers’ Association, and the National Lawyers’ Guild; at the Harvard Civil Rights Project; and at numerous other venues. Ms. Massie served as Practitioner in Residence at the UC-Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) in the spring 2002 semester.
 

Donna Stern
Treasurer, Fundraising Coordinator

      Donna Stern serves as an administrator, treasurer and fundraising coordinator for UEAALDF and worked as a paralegal on the student intervenors' legal team during the Grutter trial. A long-time political and union activist, she has worked as a unit clerk at the Detroit Medical Center for 20 years, where she has led campaigns against racist and sexist discrimination in the workplace, fought for democracy and membership control within her union, and has been a strong advocate for workers rights on the job.