Oberlin College Graduate Appointed to Chair the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

Jacqueline A. Berrien was nominated by President Obama to chair the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Since 2004 Berrien has served as associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Prior to that appointment she was a program officer for the peace and social justice program at the Ford Foundation.

Berrien is a graduate of Oberlin College, where she majored in English. She went on to graduate from Harvard Law School where she served as general editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. After law school she was a clerk for U.W. Clemon, the first African American on the U.S. district court in Birmingham, Alabama.

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