Leslie Proll
Senior Director of Voting Rights Program, at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
Leslie Proll is a civil rights lawyer in Washington, DC. Currently, she advises the NAACP on federal judicial nominations. She served as Director of the Departmental Office of Civil Rights for the U.S. Department of Transportation under President Obama, where she advised the Secretary of Transportation on civil rights matters and ensured implementation of civil rights laws and policies. For many years, she directed the Washington office of the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, where she developed and implemented strategy on civil rights legislation, monitored federal agency action involving civil rights, and evaluated federal judicial nominations to ensure diversity, fairness, and independence.
Ms. Proll has testified before Congress, written articles and opinion pieces for numerous national publications, and appeared on television and radio. She served as co-chair of the Fair Housing Task Force of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, where she helped to lead efforts to preserve the use of disparate impact under the Fair Housing Act and strengthen the obligations of communities to affirmatively further fair housing. In 2003, she received the Congressional Black Caucus Chair’s Award.
Ms. Proll spent nearly ten years as a civil rights lawyer in Birmingham, Alabama. She litigated dozens of federal civil rights cases, including class actions and jury trials, in the areas of housing discrimination, employment discrimination, voting rights, and higher education school desegregation. She helped to establish the first non-profit fair housing organization in Alabama and filed dozens of fair housing cases involving rentals, sales, lending, and exclusionary zoning.
Ms. Proll began her career as a law clerk to the late Chief Judge Sam Pointer, Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama. Ms. Proll is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and the University of California at Davis School of Law.
Panel Information
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2024
4:00 PM EST
Voting Rights Session "Ensuring Latino Representation in Democracy" Focusing on the importance of voting rights and political participation.
The need for Latino representation in democracy is underscored by their significant impact in the 2020 presidential election and the barriers to voting and political participation they often face. The UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative reported that in 2020, Latinos cast 16.6 million votes, a 30.9% increase over the 2016 presidential election, playing a key role in swinging election results in several battleground states.
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