(Brian Witte/AP)The Obama administration official who headed the Justice Department’s civil rights division will become the first woman to run the nation’s largest civil and human rights coalition at a time when advocates fear the Trump administration will roll back voting access and criminal justice reform. Longtime civil rights litigator and advocate Vanita Gupta was chosen Thursday as the new president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an umbrella organization founded 67 years ago that represents 200 national groups. “This organization is perfectly situated to address the current assault on civil rights that we are seeing today,” Gupta said. “I was honored to have been at the helm of the civil rights division at a time where civil rights issues were front and center,” Gupta said. The Leadership Conference was founded in 1950 by Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and has coordinated advocates to lobby on behalf of every major civil rights law.

Source: Washington Post March 23, 2017 15:37 UTC