Deborah Archer’s earliest memory of protest came early in her childhood. Her Jamaican immigrant parents moved their family from Hartford, Connecticut, to the suburbs, where they felt they could give their children a better life and education. They were one of just two Black families in their new neighborhood, and her white neighbors quickly made it clear they were not welcome. One morning, the family woke to find their new home vandalized, “KKK” spray-painted across their house and car.

Nine-year-old Archer was terrified, and briefly went to live with her grandmother. But her parents encouraged her, telling her she needed to fight back against the people who tried to drive the family from their new home.

“For me, going back into that house was my earliest memory of resistance,” Archer recalls. “Playing in our yard, going to our neighborhood playground — I view all of those as acts of protest, like the small acts of resistance that Black people have engaged in throughout history.”

A Life of Service and Advocacy

Archer’s act of resistance as a girl foreshadowed a life dedicated to civil rights advocacy and scholarship. This year, she takes the helm of the ACLU’s board of directors as its first Black president. It’s a fitting milestone for the lawyer, scholar, and teacher whose first job out of law school was with the ACLU’s national legal department as a Marvin M. Karpatkin legal fellow.

“After beginning my career as an ACLU fellow, it is an honor to come full circle and now lead the organization as board president,” said Archer. “This organization and its critical work has helped shape who I am as a lawyer, an advocate, a parent, a person, and a leader.”

Today, Archer is a sought after expert in civil rights, civil liberties, and racial justice. But it wasn’t until college and law school that she says she really began to understand the power of collective action. As a student at Smith College and Yale Law School, she recalls participating in and organizing protests in response to racism on campus, the Rodney King verdict, and divestment from South African apartheid. “Through all of those activities, I learned the foundational tools that I use and engage right now.”

Archer replaces Susan Herman as the president of the ACLU’s board, who stepped down after serving 12 years leading the organization’s board through numerous watershed moments. Archer has been a member of the ACLU board since 2009, and a general counsel and member of the executive committee of the board since 2017.

A tenured professor of clinical law and director of the Civil Rights Clinic at New York University School of Law, Archer takes on her new role at a pivotal moment for the ACLU. Last year, the U.S. grappled with white supremacy and a long history of racism, a protest movement rivaled only by the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s, the COVID-19 pandemic, and one of the highest turnout elections in history. These challenges exposed vast structural inequities, and, in many ways, clarified the work that lays ahead.

“COVID-19 was introduced into a society and systems that are profoundly racially discriminatory in individual, institutional, and structural ways,” says Archer. “We have to address those very fundamental, longstanding inequalities that have resulted in such an unbalanced burden for people of color.”

At the ACLU, that means continuing to do the hard work of challenging the structures that fuel systemic racism and inequity in housing, voting rights, access to resources, and more, all of which the organization is tackling in its newly-launched Systemic Equality program. Archer draws inspiration and energy from the spirited movement for racial justice and against anti-Black racism that swelled during the summer of 2020.

“Younger folks engaged in this movement don’t feel constrained by the losses of the past, and they have imagination beyond belief,” says Archer. “I think we can do ourselves a service by following their lead, because they are fearless, they are creative, and they are not deterred by the past.”

A Brighter Future For All

As Archer steps into this new role, one big reason she is eager to lead this work shines above the rest: her sons.

“Each and every time they leave the house I am terrified,” says Archer. “It is not enough for me to pray that the world will be kind. I need to fight for my children. For everyone’s children. That is why I am here. That is why the ACLU exists: To build a better future for my sons, and for all of us.”

Since the onset of the pandemic, COVID-19 has disproportionately devastated Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian communities and now, these same communities are being left in the dust in the nationwide race to vaccinate. The racial disparities in hospitalization and death rates among these groups are mirrored in early vaccination rate data. Black people are two to three times less likely than white people to be vaccinated. While statistics like these are disheartening, we can and must do better. States should push back against these disparities by prioritizing outreach and access to the vaccine in geographic areas with the most vulnerable people.

The key to equitable vaccination lies in social vulnerability data, which includes variables such as race, language, socioeconomic status, and household composition. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) aggregates this information using census tract data, which enables the agency to measure the resiliency of communities and make geographically-based recommendations to local officials using their Social Vulnerability Index (SVI).

While the CDC has collected and used this data to anticipate and respond to environmental and public health crises since 2000, the index has become an especially crucial tool in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The data offer a path forward as localities seek to relieve the disproportionate burden borne by communities of color. Social vulnerability indices help experts identify neighborhoods most at risk for COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Of all the variables measured, minority status and English language proficiency have the strongest association with COVID-19 deaths at the community level. Underlying health conditions alone cannot address the severe racial disparities in vaccination rates.

At least 26 states have announced plans to use or are already using SVIs in their vaccine distribution plans. Ohio uses the SVI to allocate the vaccine, while Arizona uses it to target outreach and communication plans. Tennessee and New Hampshire use the SVI to identify the most vulnerable geographic areas and to set aside a percentage of the vaccines for these counties.

This crucial data should be used in every state to ensure equitable vaccine access — a goal that states have fallen woefully short of thus far. Disparities in vaccination rates are plainly illustrated by health care worker data. Because the initial round of vaccines was primarily provided to these workers, the percentage of people vaccinated should align with the racial demographics of this sector. Yet despite making up a large portion of this workforce, Black people are significantly underrepresented in vaccinations.

In Mississippi, Black people comprise 37 percent of health care workers but only 15 percent of people vaccinated. Similarly, just 16 percent of people vaccinated in Maryland are Black, even though Black people comprise 42 percent of health care workers and 30 percent of the state population. Vaccination rates don’t match up with local demographics, either. In Philadelphia, just 12 percent of Black people were vaccinated, even though the population is 44 percent Black. Only 7 percent of people vaccinated in Miami-Dade County were Black, even though Black people “comprise almost 17 percent of the population and are dying from COVID-19 at a rate that is more than 60 percent higher than that of white people,” The New York Times reported.

Some of these disparities can be explained by systemic barriers to vaccine access in low-income communities and communities of color, such as the lack of technology, transportation access to vaccine sites, or ability to take off work. Many people in low-income communities lack the stable, high-speed internet access required to continue refreshing sign-up websites for appointments, and registration phone lines have notoriously long wait times and are difficult to navigate. Wealthy white people with more access to these resources have taken a disproportionate share of vaccinations provided in low-income communities of color. In Washington, D.C., 40 percent of vaccination appointments were made by residents of the city’s whitest, wealthiest ward.

Social vulnerability data is key to intentionally increasing vaccine access to those who need it most, but it should be coupled with other tools to counter barriers to vaccination. To combat skepticism and mistrust, states should increase culturally sensitive education about the vaccine, including community and faith-based outreach and marketing. States should facilitate non-computer registration for the vaccine. Further, states should expand locations for distribution to residents of the most vulnerable neighborhoods. This can include working with mobile health vans and community health workers, and offering vaccinations at federally qualified health centers, as well as community-based health care providers in underserved areas.

The best way to assess whether those who need the vaccine most are receiving it is through transparent and thorough data collection. States should collect and report vaccination data — consistent with all privacy laws and best practices — by various demographic factors, including race and zip codes of those who are vaccinated, to identify and eliminate disparities. Disparities were consistent in the 34 states that have released vaccination data by race to date. Black and Latinx people receive smaller shares of the vaccination than their proportion of the larger population and COVID-19 hospitalizations or deaths. Finally, states should conduct fact-finding hearings with testimony from public health, history, and economic experts to identify and remedy incidents of discrimination in the response to the pandemic.

Communities of color continue to bear the brunt of COVID-19, and this crisis has laid bare the impact of systemic racism in the U.S. Inequitable vaccine access is the latest manifestation of this ongoing problem. It is up to state officials to mitigate these racial disparities by using social vulnerability data to prioritize vaccine access and distribution to the most vulnerable groups.