Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ)

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, SCSJ takes funding from left-of-center foundations. These foundations, among them the Ford Foundation,⁵ the Foundation to Promote Open Society,⁶ and the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation,⁷ provided most of the $12.5 million in revenue SCSJ received from 2008 through 2016. ⁸ The Ford Foundation provided Earls the initial grant to assist in the creation of SCSJ. ¹

 A major focus of SCSJ’s election law work has been challenging the congressional maps drawn by Republican state legislatures in North Carolina⁹ and other states. ¹⁰ In other recent election law cases SCSJ opposed implementation of a law that would require North Carolina voters to show a photo ID at polling places¹¹ and sued a law firm for helping North Carolina Republicans file voter fraud complaints during the 2016 gubernatorial election recount/challenge. ¹² The organization also represented convicted felons in North Carolina who were still serving out a sentence as they illegally cast ballots in the 2016 election. ¹³

Background

The Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ), located in Durham, North Carolina, was founded in 2007 and began operations in 2009 with a program to increase the count of low-income, homeless, and minority persons in North Carolina and other southern states by the 2010 U.S. Census. Founder Anita Earls has suggested that her ultimate objective was for SCSJ to replicate the business model of the Southern Poverty Law Center or the Southern Environmental Law Center. ¹

The Census program began with funding from the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Institute – grants that Earls said allowed SCSJ to transfer the money as “mini grants” to local community groups who were “not necessarily organized into 501(c)(3) organizations” but could provide the Census assistance SCSJ sought. She considers the Census work to be SCSJ’s first “voting rights” project. ¹

As of February 2019, the SCSJ website lists 19 employees. Excluding the executive director, ten of the remaining 18 are attorneys credited with working either voting rights or criminal justice. ²

Personnel

Anita Earls

Anita Earls is the founder of SCSJ, and from 2007 to 2017 was its first executive director. In November 2017, she announced as a candidate for the North Carolina Supreme Court,¹⁴ and stepped down from her position at SCSJ at the end of 2017. ³ She won the November 2018 judicial race, and serves on the North Carolina Supreme Court.

Her total compensation from SCSJ for 2017 (salary and other benefits) was reported as $138,694. ⁴
Prior to founding SCSJ, Earls was a deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S. Justice Department during the Clinton administration and a law professor at the University of North Carolina, Duke University, and the University of Maryland. ¹⁵

Kareem Crayton

Kareem Crayton, Ph.D., became the interim executive director of SCSJ on January 1, 2018, after founder and executive director Anita Earls stepped down to seek a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court. Crayton is an academic “whose work centers on the intersection of law, politics, and race.” Prior to his position with SCSJ, he managed a consulting firm and was on the faculty at Vanderbilt University Law School. ³

Allison Riggs

Allison Riggs joined SCSJ in 2009 and is the senior staff attorney and leader of the organization’s voting rights and redistricting practice. She argued a redistricting case before the United State Supreme Court in 2018. ¹⁶

Funding

Left-wing foundations have provided a majority of SCSJ’s funding. In a 2014 interview, SCSJ founder Anita Earls stated the organization’s funding had come “primarily” from foundations and that “we don’t have much funding from individuals.” She credited the Ford Foundation for providing an initial “planning” grant to assist in the creation of SCSJ. ¹
SCSJ’s total revenue from 2008 to 2016 was slightly more than $12.5 million. ⁸ The left-wing Ford Foundation provided more than $4.4 million of the total (35 percent) during this period. ⁵

Eight other large, left-wing foundations provided more than $3.1 million (another 25 percent of total revenue) during the 2008-2016 period:

• Smith Reynolds Foundation (and the Zachary Smith Reynolds Trust)—$1.5 million. ⁷
• Foundation to Promote Open Society—$905,000. ⁶
• K. Kellogg Foundation—$350,000. ¹⁷
• Rockefeller Brothers Fund—$200,000. ¹⁸
• Public Welfare Foundation—$100,000. ¹⁹
• Proteus Fund—$25,000. ²⁰
• Park Foundation—$40,000. ²¹
• Bauman Family Foundation—$20,000. ²²

Also, in a July 2018 statement, NEO Philanthropy, a fiscal clearinghouse for left-of-center causes, listed SCSJ as a “grantee.”²³

For 2017 the Southern Coalition for Social Justice took in nearly $3.4 million in total revenue – more than $2.9 million in contributions, plus a little more than $400,000 credited as revenue from “program services.” Total expenses for 2017 were slightly more than $2.1 million. This tied the best prior fundraising year for SCSJ: $2.9 million in contributions were also recorded for 2015. ²⁴

Legal Agenda

In recent years SCSJ has represented clients in many high-profile election law cases, mostly in North Carolina, but in other southern states. Some examples are noted below.

Voter ID

An amendment to the North Carolina constitution that requires voters to present a photo ID when going to the polls was approved by 55.5 percent of North Carolina voters during the November 2018 midterm election. ²⁵ By the end of that month a bi-partisan group of North Carolina state lawmakers had proposed legislation to implement the new constitutional provision, allowing any one of seven forms of photo identification (including military, veteran, and student IDs) to be used to satisfy the constitutional directive. ²⁶ Lawmakers in both legislative chambers overwhelmingly approved the measure, and then in December supermajorities passed it into law after overriding a veto from North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D). ²⁷

Within an hour of the override, SCSJ filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the new law, arguing it discriminated against African-Americans and other minority groups. ¹¹

Redistricting

SCSJ filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn and rewrite North Carolina’s U.S. House district map, alleging the map includes “partisan gerrymandering” favoring Republicans and illegally disadvantaging Democratic voters. The lawsuits were filed in partnership with the left-wing Campaign Legal Center, and on behalf of the North Carolina chapter of the left-of-center League of Women Voters and 12 individual voters in the state. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case beginning March 2019. ⁹

In 2018 and early 2019 SCSJ also participated in federal redistricting lawsuits involving Texas (regarding both the U.S. House and state legislative maps)¹⁰ and Virginia (regarding the maps for the House of Delegates). ²⁸

Defending Alleged Illegal Voters

In April 2017 the North Carolina Board of Elections released a report showing 508 ineligible voters had voted during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, with 441 doing so while still serving felony sentences or on probation for same. Those with active felony convictions are not permitted to vote in North Carolina. State elections officials turned the 441 names over to local prosecutors for decisions regarding if charges would be filed. ²⁹

Charges were filed in some jurisdictions, with the district attorney in Alamance County, North Carolina, deciding to prosecute 12 persons for illegally voting while still serving a felony sentence.  SCSJ defended five of the so-called “Alamance 12” – each was facing another felony conviction, and potential incarceration. The SCSJ clients ultimately accepted plea bargains in which they accepted misdemeanor convictions for obstruction of justice in exchange for the state dropping the felony charges against them. ¹³
Alamance County had initially been sent the names of 15 persons, but the prosecutor decided to file charges against only the 12. In 2012, the same prosecutor had declined to prosecute two non-citizens for illegally voting, stating there was insufficient evidence the individuals intended to commit a crime. ³⁰

2016 Gubernatorial Election Suit

After the 2016 North Carolina gubernatorial election, four North Carolina citizens whose status as eligible voters during the election had been formally challenged filed a class-action defamation lawsuit against the McCrory Legal Defense Fund representing Republican Gov. Pat McCrory and Holtzman Vogel, a Virginia law firm that represented Republicans in the election challenge. ¹² The four voters suing the McCrory defense fund and the law firm were represented by attorneys from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. ³¹

The 2016 North Carolina gubernatorial election was won by Democrat Roy Cooper over McCrory by a margin of roughly 10,000 out of 4.7 million total votes. The Republican’s campaign contested the results of the close race, which initially (on election night) showed a Cooper lead of about 5,000 votes. ³² The McCrory challenges included requests for recounts of the vote tallies,³³ challenges to the legality of specific voters (e.g.: asserting that 43 voters may have fraudulently submitted ballots),³⁴ and assertions of potential fraudulent returns in several jurisdictions. ³⁵

The challenges against the legality of some voters were mostly dismissed by county election boards. The recount changed the official tally by about 5,000 votes, but in the direction of adding to Cooper’s margin of victory, and McCrory conceded. ³²

The SCSJ complaint on behalf of its clients asserted the four voters had been defamed by the formal accusation that they were not valid voters. Arguing in April 2018 that the case should be dismissed, a Holtzman Vogel attorney stated “You can’t actually challenge the outcome or results of an election unless you can challenge the ballots and whether they were cast lawfully.”¹²
In May 2018 a North Carolina judge ruled against the request for a dismissal and allowed the case to move forward. ³⁶

Defending Vandals

SCSJ lawyers represented some of the protestors who participated in the August 2017 destruction of the Confederate Soldiers Monument outside the Durham County, North Carolina, courthouse. In February 2018 the Durham district attorney announced he would be dismissing charges against the protesters. ³⁷

The monument, depicting a single, unnamed solider, and not a specific, historical person, had been a general memorial to Confederate soldiers who fought in the Civil War. ³⁸ Following the dropping of charges against protesters who destroyed the memorial, the SCSJ attorney working the case stated: “The statue that was torn down was a symbol of white supremacy that has no place in front of the public buildings that represent our community… We need to make monuments to the ill-conceived project of white supremacy a thing of the past.”³⁷