Honoring and congratulating Deborah Archer for her new position as the first Black president of the American Civil Liberties Union.

WHEREAS, Deborah Archer was elected to be the eighth president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on January 30, 2021. She is the first Black president of the ACLU since its founding 101 years ago, and is a nationally recognized expert in civil rights, civil liberties, and racial justice; and

WHEREAS, Archer is a child of Jamaican immigrants, a first-generation citizen of the United States, and a first-generation college student. She is married to New York’s former deputy mayor, Richard Beury, and has two sons; and

WHEREAS, Archer graduated with honors from Smith College with a degree in Government in 1993, and received a JD from Yale Law School, where she was awarded the Charles G. Albom prize, in 1996; and

WHEREAS, After graduating from Yale Law School, Archer clerked on the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut from 1996 to 1997. She also worked as a legal fellow for the ACLU from 1997 to 1998, and as assistant council at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Education Fund from 1998 to 2000; and

WHEREAS, Archer was a member of the faculty at New York Law School (NYLS) for fifteen years and an associate at the firm Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett. She was the first Dean of Diversity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer at NYLS, and led the school’s Racial Justice Project and the Impact Center for Public Interest Law, which she co-founded; and

WHEREAS, Archer has been on the ACLU board since 2009, and has been general counsel and a member of the board’s executive committee since 2017. She previously served on board of the New York Civil Liberties Union, the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board, and the 2018 New York City Charter Revision Commission; and

WHEREAS, In 2018, Archer moved to New York University (NYU), where she is currently the Jacob K. Javits Professor and Professor of Clinical Law, Co-Faculty Director of the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law, and Director of the Civil Rights Clinic at New York University School of Law. Her areas of research include civil liberties, civil rights, clinical pedagogy, and racial discrimination; and

WHEREAS, Archer received the Otto L. Walter Distinguished Writing Award and the 2014 Haywood Burns/Shanara Guilbert Award from the Northeast People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference. Deborah was recognized by the

New York Law Journal

as one of New York’s 2016 Top Women in Law;

now, therefore, be it

RESOLVED, BY THE COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA, That it hereby honors and congratulates Deborah Archer for her new position as the first Black president of the American Civil Liberties Union.

FURTHER RESOLVED, That an Engrossed copy of this resolution be presented to Deborah Archer, further evidencing the sincere admiration and respect of this legislative body.

End