April 22, 2009
City rights group hires a scholar with extra talent
By JAMES F. LOWE
Staff Writer
Copyright GazetteNET.com
NORTHAMPTON — A city-based civil rights group has a new leader in hip-hipping constitutional lawyer Shahid Buttar.
Formed in 2002, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee is a groupfocused on civil liberties education and energizing grassroots activism around the country. The group is headquartered at 8 Bridge St. in Northampton.
Now based in the San Francisco Bay area, Buttar will move to Northampton and take the reins of the committee in mid-May. He succeeds former executive director and cofounder nancy talanian, who stepped down last fall.
Buttar said his main effort as executive director will be to advance opposition to domestic surveillance and immigration enforcement by local, as opposed to federal, authorities. in the process, he said he hopes to draw together civil libertarians with America's immigrant communities.
"Our ultimate aim is to shift the landscape on liberties to bring new faces to it," he said in a telephone interview.
Chip Pitts, president of the committee's board of directors, said Buttar impressed the organization's leaders with his dual background in community activism and constitutional law.
"He's got intellectual firepower," Pitts said.
The committee's work continues to be important, he said, as the administration of President Barack Obama leaves in place some policies the group considers violations of the Bill of Rights.
While the new president created hope when he announced plans to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center for terror suspects, Pitts said, he's taken an opposite tack on the prison at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan.
"For everything good we've heard out of the administration ... there's been something bad," he said.
A 2003 Stanford Law School graduate, Buttar has taught alongside constitutional law scholar Lawrence Lessig and written columns for the Huffington Post. His work as a lawyer has centered on marriage equality in New York and campaign finance reform in Washington, and most recently trying to bring to ligth the secret Domestic Investigative Operational Guidelines used by the FBI.
Hip-hop threads
he's also a hip-hop performer. For Buttar, there's a lot of overlap between the music and constitutional law, which he said is designed to empower average people.
"Hip-hop was the same thing when it emerged," he said. "It was a tool to give voice to voiceless people."
Last summer the Bill of Rights Defense Committee issued "A Declaration for Our Times," which decried government spying on U.S. citizens and the impreisonment of so-called "enemy combatants" at Guantánamo Bay.
The declaration ran as a paid advertisement in the New York Times, and a video of it being read aloud featured Amherst resident Mohamed Elgadi, a Sudanese refugee, and Buz Eisenberg of Greenfield, a lawyer who represents some Guantánamo detainees.
After the passage of the USA Patriot Act in 2001, the committee began its People's Campaign for the Constitution, urging towns and cities around the U.S. to adopt a resolution urging civil liberties be protected.
According to the group, eight states, 406 municipalities and 89 other organizations, including labor unions, religious congregations and colleges, have adopted the resolution.
James F. Lowe can be reached at jlowe@gazettenet.com.