24th Annual MLK Celebration Keynote

Civil rights attorney and political activist Lezli Baskerville is a graduate of Rutgers University and Howard University Law School. She is general counsel to the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education (NAFEO), an umbrella organization of the 117 predominantly black colleges and universities, both private and land grant. She was senior assistant to retired US Rep. William Gray of Pennsylvania on the the Budget Committee, and she was equal opportunity/civil rights counsel to retired US Rep. Walter Fauntroy of the District of Columbia. She was also the founding director of the National Black Leadership Roundtable, sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus.

In 1989, she formed the Baskerville Group, a Washington-based legal and legislative services group whose clients include elected officials, institutions of higher learning, municipalities and nonprofit organizations.

Ms. Baskerville worked on Rev. Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988 and was Louisiana's deputy coordinator for the1996 Clinton-Gore campaign. She is a founding board member of the National Rainbow Coalition.

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