Anita Earls

Earls grew up in Seattle, Washington after her parents relocated the family from Missouri based on the illegality of their interracial marriage (Earls' mother is white, her father black). Earls and her brother (who was darker-skinned than Earls) were both adoptees.[6] Earls' first six years in Seattle were spent in a black neighborhood, after which her family integrated a previously all-white neighborhood. In the racially turbulent 1960s, Earls recalled in a 2014 oral history at Duke University that, growing up, "I always had this great fear that because my family looked the way we did, with my brother looking more black than I did, that if we were ever in a neighborhood and a riot broke out, people wouldn’t know that we were a family. And it felt like the wrong people would be trying to hurt us."

Earls is a graduate of Williams College and Yale Law School.[7] Attending Williams College, where she majored in political economy and philosophy, Earls observed that "people knew I wasn’t quite white, but they didn’t really know what I was." Upon graduation Earls received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study the role of women in Ujamaa villages in Tanzania, but her time abroad was cut short by multiple bouts of malaria. She subsequently moved to England, worked in a solicitor's office, and married her first husband. Three years later she returned to the United States to attend Yale Law, because she "had this burning desire to be a lawyer and to try to bring about change [....] I wanted to work on issues of racism in the U.S." During her law school studies she gave birth to her first child.

Earls has taught at Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Maryland.[8]

Following her graduation from Yale Law School, in 1988 Earls was recruited by civil rights champion James Ferguson II to join North Carolina's first integrated law firm, Ferguson, Stein, Watt, Wallas, Adkins & Gresham,[9][10] where she practiced civil rights litigation first as an associate and later as partner.

In 1998 Earls was appointed by President Bill Clinton to serve as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.[11]

After serving as director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights' voting rights project (2000-2003) and as director of advocacy at the University of North Carolina Center for Civil Rights (2003-2007),[12] she founded in 2007 the Southern Coalition For Social Justice (SCSJ) in Durham, NC, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose team of lawyers, social scientists, community organizers and media specialists "partners with communities of color and economically disadvantaged communities in the south to defend and advance their political, social and economic rights through the combination of legal advocacy, research, organizing and communications."[13] There she served as SCSJ's founding executive director, stepping down in 2017 to run for Associate Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court.[14]

While at SCSJ, Earls represented clients in several notable voting rights lawsuits, including serving as lead plaintiffs' attorney in North Carolina v. Covington,[15] a landmark case that the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in 2017, which resulted in 28 of North Carolina's state house and senate districts being deemed unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.[16] A federal court then ordered a special master to redraw the districts' boundaries for the 2018 election, where under the new maps, state Democrats broke the legislature's nearly decade-long Republican supermajority.[17][18]

Following her election to Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, Earls has written numerous opinions of significance on issues such as the North Carolina Racial Justice Act,[19] the maintenance of privacy rights associated with warrantless searches,[20] and media defamation suits.[21]

On June 9, 2020, Governor Roy Cooper appointed Earls as the Co-Chair of North Carolina's Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice.[22] The Task Force, convened in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, has begun issuing recommendations such as banning choke holds, suggesting that law enforcement agencies implement "duty to report" rules regarding excessive force, and requiring North Carolina to include information on race in its data reporting.[23] The work of the task force is ongoing.