Lower Manhattan Bar Association Conference: Social Evolution in the Age of Obama – From Gang Communities to Community Service

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Anita Aboulafia 212-267-6646, ext. 225, aaboulafia@nycla.org

 

Lower Manhattan Bar Association Conference: Social Evolution in the Age of Obama – From Gang Communities to Community Service

 

OCTOBER 5, 2009 – NEW YORK, NY – The New York County Lawyers’ Association (NYCLA) is presenting its second annual gang prevention conference, Social Evolution in the Age of Obama – From Gang Communities to Community Service, on Tuesday, October 6 from 4:00-7:00 PM at the NYCLA Home of Law, 14 Vesey Street in Lower Manhattan. The keynote speaker is Dr. Robert P. Moses, civil rights pioneer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Admission is free to the conference, which seeks to gather information and formulate effective strategies that can be used to empower youth communities, prevent and reduce gang membership and direct public policy.

 

The panelists scheduled to speak are: Frances Brown, chair of Mothers Against Gangs; Nigel Farinha, ADA, deputy unit chief, Special Narcotics Gang Unit, Manhattan DA’s Office; and A.T. Mitchell, chair of Man Up!

 

Dr. Robert P. Moses

Dr. Robert P. Moses was born and raised in Harlem. After receiving a B.A. from Hamilton College and a Masters Degree in Philosophy from Harvard University, he taught middle school at New York City’s Horace Mann School. During his young adult life, Dr. Moses was a pivotal organizer for the civil rights movement, working as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and as director of SNCC’s Mississippi Summer Project. He served as co-director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a group comprising all of the major civil rights organizations working in Mississippi at the time. In that capacity, he was recognized as a driving force behind the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964 and in organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the Mississippi regulars at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, NJ. Through a partnership with the Algebra Project Inc., Dr. Moses is currently serving as an eminent scholar at the Center for Urban Education & Innovation at Florida International University in Miami. Dr. Moses is also serving as a Frank H. T. Rhodes Class of 1956 Visiting Professor at Cornell University (2007 ongoing to 2011).

 

NYCLA’s Law-Related Education Committee’s Youth at Risk Subcommittee is sponsoring the conference. Hon. Richard Lee Price, chair of the Law-Related Education Committee, acknowledges the conference co-sponsors: NYCLA’s Civil Rights & Liberties, Minorities & the Law and Education Law Committees and Criminal Justice Section; the Gender Fairness Committee – 12th Judicial District; the Bronx Women’s Bar Association; and the New York Women’s Bar Association.

The New York County Lawyers’ Association (www.nycla.org) was founded in 1908 as the first major bar association in the country that admitted members without regard to race, ethnicity, religion or gender. Since its inception, it has pioneered some of the most far-reaching and tangible reforms in American jurisprudence and has continuously played an active role in legal developments and public policy.

 

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