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FLORIDA ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL, CIVIL RIGHTS LITIGATOR APPOINTED
AS NEW ACLU OF FLORIDA LEGAL DIRECTOR
August 29, 2000
Although he spent the last three-and-a-half years defending city and state governments, attorney Randall C. Marshall had no qualms about switching sides and joining the ranks of the nation's oldest and most established civil rights organization.
From defending police officers accused of misconduct to now representing their civilian accusers, Marshall will likely pit himself against municipal governments on countless occasions as the new legal director of the ACLU of Florida, taking on legal challenges that address issues like racial profiling, police brutality and prison conditions across the state of Florida.
"The experience I have gained over the last three-and-a-half years in which I have represented government agencies will prove to be very valuable in terms of being able to develop strategies to address a range of constitutional rights issues," said Marshall, 48, who had been a Florida Assistant Attorney General since June 1999. Prior to joining the Attorney General's office, Marshall worked for two years as an assistant City Solicitor for the City of Pittsburgh, where he represented the municipality in numerous cases brought by the ACLU.
For most of his 18 years practicing law, however, Marshall has spoken for the oftenignored havenots in courts of law. Before joining the City of Pittsburgh's Legal Department, he was a senior attorney for Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, an Ohio nonprofit legal service provider that specialized in addressing issues of civil rights and employment discrimination. For five years after law school, he worked for Texas Rural Legal Aid, representing migrant farm workers in class action lawsuits against shippers and growers, challenging violations of federal labor laws. "The fact that migrant farm workers were bringing lawsuits against the powers that be really ruffled a lot of feathers," Marshall noted.
Born in Washington, Marshall grew up in Center, Colorado, a small town surrounded by mountains in the San Luis valley, 200 miles southwest of Denver. He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and sociology from the University of Northern Colorado, where he met Margaret, his wife of 25 years. In 1975, shortly after receiving his master's degree in mathematics, Marshall decided to follow in his older brother's footsteps and become a Peace Corps volunteer. In 1976, he and his wife, a middle school Language Arts teacher, were assigned to teach mathematics and English, respectively, at a girls' boarding school in Ng'iya, Kenya.
His experiences in Kenya combined with his developing interest in social change, prompted him to apply to law school while in Africa. In 1978, prior to completing his twoyear volunteer position with the Peace Corps, he took the LSAT in Nairobi and got accepted to the University of Colorado. "My interest certainly at the time was to be involved in social change, and law was one way to go about doing that," said Marshall. "I see it as the reason I went to law school to work for civil rights, equality and social justice."
A civil libertarian at heart, Marshall joined the ACLU in 1979 during his first year at the University of Colorado School of Law, where he did volunteer research work on several prisonrelated cases sponsored by the ACLU. His first job after graduating from law school in 1982 was with the Farm Worker Division of the Texas Rural Legal Aid in Hereford, Texas, a small agricultural community of 17,000 residents. Working out of a remote satellite office, Marshall was one of five civil rights attorneys who filed highimpact lawsuits on behalf of farm workers, many of whom lived in poor living conditions and were paid as little as 17 cents an hour. The lawsuits generated so much national publicity that Marshall appeared as the group's spokesperson on Pat Robertson's religious 700 Club television program. "For lawyers from outside suing powerful growers and shippers, it was really a slap in the face for the establishment," added Marshall.
Marshall welcomes the chance to take on the highprofile job duties of legal director for the ACLU of Florida the national organization's fifth largest affiliate. "When you look at things like school vouchers and the Governor's attempt to dismantle affirmative action, those are issues that are going to be in the forefront and it's incumbent upon us as an organization to involve ourselves in both the passing of legislation and, to the extent that we have to, challenge legislation," he said.
Randall and Margaret Marshall, an Associate Professor of English and Director of Composition at the University of Miami, have a son, Caleb, 21, a student at the University of South Florida in Tampa and a daughter, Kileen, 16, who attends Palmetto High School in Miami.
