Excited about personal news. Am heading up voting rights program of nation’s largest civil rights coalition @civilrightsorg under new leadership of fabulous @mayawiley. Help our great team #ProtectTheVOTE. Voting rights are foundational because they preserve all other rights.
— Leslie Proll (@LeslieProll) May 9, 2022
Leslie Proll
Civil Rights Attorney
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.