CONTACT: Meredith Curtis, Communications Director, 410-889-8555; media@aclu-md.org
ANNAPOLIS - On Thursday, March 20, ACLU of Maryland of Maryland Executive Director Susan Goering will be honored by the Maryland Commission for Women as an inductee to the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame. Goering is being honored for her 25 years of amazing, dedicated work and leadership on behalf of the rights of all Marylanders as legal director and then executive director of the ACLU.
Susan K. Goering was born in 1952 in Newtown, Kansas, to a Mennonite family. Goering attended the University of Kansas for college and law school. From 1982 to 1985, she worked on the last Brown v. Board of Education-style school segregation case, Jenkins v. State of Mo., which was initiated by NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Kansas City, Missouri. In 1986, Susan came to Maryland to become Legal Director for the ACLU of Maryland.and in 1996, she became the organization's Executive Director. During that time she led the Maryland ACLU's advocacy in post-9/11 America, while overseeing a substantial expansion of the organization's staff, program and resources.
Susan Goering is a strong advocate for strategies to end institutional racism and structural segregation. She has been the mastermind behind some of Maryland's biggest civil rights cases of the last several decades. These include the lawsuit, Bradford v. Board of Education, on behalf of all public school children in Baltimore, which argued that Maryland's most vulnerable students were not receiving the "thorough and efficient" education guaranteed them by the State Constitution. The success in the Bradford court case propelled the passage of the historic Bridge to Excellence in Education Act ("Thornton" formula), which increased statewide education funding based on a formula that gave extra funding to districts with high levels of children in poverty, children with learning challenges, and children who spoke English as a second language.
Another landmark lawsuit brought during Goering's tenure was Thompson v. HUD, which has helped thousands of African American families who lived in segregated public housing in Baltimore move to areas of opportunity around the region where parents and children secured better health, education and jobs.
Goering's vision in both cases was to help eradicate the legacy of centuries of Jim Crow and government-sponsored racial segregation in the Baltimore region.
Read more about the cases brought by and advocacy accomplished under Susan Goering during her tenure at the ACLU of Maryland. Read her nomination for the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame.
Susan Goering's nomination was supported by recommendations from activist and former ACLU of Maryland Board Chair, Sally T. Grant, herself a Maryland Women's Hall of Fame honoree; National ACLU Washington Legislative Office Director Laura Murphy, a native Marylander; and Gerald Stansbury, president of the Maryland State Conference of the NAACP.
WHAT: Induction of Susan Goering, Executive Director of the ACLU of Maryland, to the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame.
WHEN: Thursday, March 20 at 7 PM.
WHERE: Miller Senate Building, 11 Bladen Street Annapolis, MD 21401.
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