Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke Delivers Remarks to Zeta Phi Beta Sorority Inc. for Zeta Day on the Hill

Remarks as Prepared for Delivery

Good afternoon to the Finer Women of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority. Thank you, President Stacie Grant and all the former presidents and board members. Today is a good day to be on the Hill. Thank you for coming here to advocate for important issues for all women and thank you for having me.

I am Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, and I lead the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department. As the first woman and first Black woman to be confirmed by the Senate to lead the division, and the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, raised in Brooklyn, New York, I am truly honored to spend time with members of an organization that has done so much to meet social, health, and economic needs in the community.

It is not lost on me that your great movement was started by “Five Pearls,” women who were Howard University students in the 1920s. This was a time of renaissance in Harlem, achievements in business, the arts and academics in the Black community. Unfortunately, this forward movement was juxtaposed against the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and race-based violence – Red Summer in 1919 in Elaine, Arkansas, the attack on Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, the Rosewood Massacre in Florida in 1923 and more. Your advocacy and attention to the matters that affect our communities today reflect the Five Pearls’ founding values.

I want to acknowledge the strength, solidarity and sisterhood in this room. Your work is as important and necessary now as it has ever been, focused on the Extraordinary Power of S.H.E. – Social, Health and Economic Justice. You offer service, and your advocacy helps bolster women and girls across the country and around the world.

This is work that closely aligns with the work of the Civil Rights Division, and, today, I want to speak with you about challenges we face when it comes to our democracy, racial justice and racial equity — and about how the Justice Department works to address these issues.

Because you are on the frontlines, you know that we face threats to democracy and that we continue to see efforts to silence the voices of eligible voters, especially since the Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court decision in 2013, which gutted a core provision from the Voting Rights Act. The preclearance provision helped to block and deter hundreds of discriminatory voting changes in parts of the country with long and egregious histories of voting discrimination. The challenges we see today make clear the need to continue to call for restoration of the Voting Rights Act.

The current attack on voting rights is widespread and deeply cynical. And without the vital tool of preclearance, our job is harder today. But we are not deterred – we continue to use every tool available to address the voting challenges we face today.

For example, we recently challenged a law in Arizona that required people to list their birthplace and to provide proof of citizenship when they registered to vote, a discriminatory rule explicitly barred by federal law.

We are working to beat back discriminatory redistricting efforts and have mounted challenges in states such as Georgia and Texas.

We are using laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act to ensure that voters with disabilities are able to freely cast their ballots.

We are monitoring elections on the ground to ensure free access to the ballot box. Since 2021, we have monitored elections in at least 73 jurisdictions in at least 24 states – work that we will continue moving forward.

We are beating back efforts to weaken our federal voting rights laws by confronting attacks on legal principles like the private right of action, meaning the right of organizations like yours to file suits under the Voting Rights Act.

And we are also standing up to voter intimidation and working to beat back efforts to suppress the voices of voters, particularly voters of color. In July we filed a brief in New Hampshire arguing that dispensing disinformation, including through robocalls, about the time, place or manner of voting can violate Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voter intimidation.

Efforts to suppress voting rights are relentless, and we must remain vigilant. Ida B. Wells reminds us that “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” So, we need your help. We need you to use your voice to call out voter intimidation in your communities. We need you to flag jurisdictions that be improperly and unlawfully removing voters from the registration rolls. We need you to insist that your election officials comply with the law and ensure a fair electoral process. We need you to advocate for the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to restore preclearance to the Voting Rights Act and rebuild a fortress around this fundamental right.

As I look out into this audience of women, I want to lift up for you the work that what we are doing to stand up for women’s rights and underscore our efforts to confront sexual harassment and sexual assault. This Friday, the Violence Against Women Act turns 30 years old. We use this federal law and others such as the Fair Housing Act and our criminal authorities, to protect women from sexual abuse that we see in too many contexts – women harassed by predatory landlords; women discriminated against in the workplace; women assaulted by the very officials charged with protecting them in our jails and prisons; women subjected to cruel and vicious sex trafficking schemes. Just last Friday, a unanimous jury returned a guilty verdict against a Border Patrol officer who sexually assaulted a 15-year old. The girl was waiting for school to start, approached by the officer who ordered the child into his car and explained that he was taking her to the police station. Instead, the defendant drove the child miles away from her school, restrained her hands and feet with handcuffs, forced the girl into his apartment and repeatedly sexually assaulted her over the course of several hours. We will use every tool available to protect the rights, dignity and safety of women and girls.

Rest assured that the Justice Department and the Civil Rights Division is exploring all viable options to keep the public safe, enforce the rule of law and protect civil rights.

Given Zeta Phi Beta’s commitment to economic justice, I wanted to speak to our efforts to close the racial wealth gap. We know that today white families’ median wealth is approximately $285,000, while Black family wealth is just $45,000.

One of the biggest drivers of the disparities that we see today is modern day redlining – where banks and financial institutions fail to provide equal access to loans to all communities. That is why we launched the Combatting Redlining Initiative in 2021 – a nationwide effort where we are coordinating with U.S. Attorneys, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other agencies to address redlining on an unprecedented national scale. Next month marks the three-year anniversary of our initiative. I am proud to report that since the launch of our initiative, we have secured more than $122 million in relief for Black communities and communities of color across the country through our settlement agreements with banks and mortgage companies. This relief is helping to generate $1 billion of economic activity in affected communities from Tulsa, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Newark, New Jersey, to Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas and Florida. We do this work because every community in our country, including Black communities, deserve access to the American Dream and homeownership opportunities.

In addition to redlining, equity is also central to the work that we do to ensure fair and equitable policing in our country. We heard the rallying cries that unfolded in communities all across our country who, following the tragic deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, wanted constitutional policing and wanted a meaningful response to the unlawful use of excessive and deadly force that tragically can result in the loss of innocent lives. Since 2021, we have prosecuted more than 220 defendants in color of law related cases and secured more than 170 convictions. Those figures include the four officers tied to the death of George Floyd, it includes our ongoing prosecution of five officers tied to the death of Breonna Taylor, it include our prosecution underway right now against several officers tied to the death of Tyre Nichols and it includes our successful prosecution of five officers known as the Goon Squad in Rankin County, Mississippi who used torture and violence to assault two young Black men. The lead defendant was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

I want to leave you with a word about our efforts to address the rise in hate crimes that we are seeing in too many communities across the country. The last set of FBI hate crimes data makes clear than racially motivated hate crimes are on the rise and Black people are the group most frequently targeted. Since January 2021, we’ve charged more than 120 defendants in over 110 cases. This includes prosecuting the men responsible for the tragic killing of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia; a 27-count indictment against the man responsible for the tragic mass killings of 10 Black people in Buffalo, New York; and prosecuting the defendant responsible for the murder of Dime Doe, a Black trans woman in South Carolina.

Just this past Monday, along with the National Security Division and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California, we announced indictments of two leaders of a group called the Terrorgram Collective. Our indictment alleges that defendants solicited others to engage in hate crimes and terrorist attacks against Black, immigrant, LGBT and Jewish people, to attack government infrastructure and to target politicians and government officials, as well as leaders of private companies and non-governmental organizations. The defendants’ goal, the indictment charges, was to ignite a race war, “accelerate” the collapse of what they viewed as an irreparably corrupt government and bring about a white ethnostate. As the indictment lays out, defendants used the internet platform Telegram to post messages promoting their white supremacist “accelerationism.”

This indictment reflects the Justice Department’s response to the new technological face of white supremacist violence — as those seeking mass violence expand their online reach to encourage, solicit and facilitate terrorist activities. Technology evolves, and we keep up. These charges make clear that the department will come after violent white supremacists with every legitimate means at our disposal.

I’ll close by sharing some sobering words from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. At last year’s commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the tragic bombing of the 16th street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, Justice Jackson stated that “History is also our best teacher. Yes, our past is filled with too much violence, too much hatred, too much prejudice. But can we really say that we are confronting some of those same evils now.” I close with tremendous gratitude that you are bringing to this work and to the challenges that we face as a nation. I close with appreciation for the Zeta Phi Beta’s commitment to being a force for change. I am here to affirm that the Justice Department is an ally, we share your mission to make equality, freedom and justice more tangible for all communities. We are the People’s Justice Department, and we stand with you. Thank you.