Black Yale Alumna to Serve On University Governing Board

NEW HAVEN. Conn--A second Black woman recently began serving on the Yale Corporation, the university's governing body, the Yale Daily News reported last week.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, who will serve a six-year term as an alumni fellow on the corporation which has permanent and temporary members, teaches law at Georgetown University She received from Yale a master's degree in American Studies in 1963 and an LL.B. in 1964.

Norton has worked as assistant legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union and spent seven years as head of New York City's Commission on Human Rights In 1977, she assumed leadership of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EFOC) under President Jimmy Carter.

In the three years that she headed the EEOC. Norton reduced the commission's huge back log of cases and helped improve its settlement rate from 14 to 52 percent.

Norton, who has written for publications such as Ms. Dessent and The Nation, has been a vocal supporter of affirmative action programs to end job discrimination against women and minorities.

The consciousness of being one of three or four Blacks in her class at the law school fueled her interest in the civil rights protests in New Haven in the early '60s.

Corporation letters Bishop Paul Moore recently said, "I think she going to add a tremendous amount. We need, on the corporation, people with diverse experience. We don't have anybody at the moment with the kind of political experience. We don't have anybody at the moment with the kind of political experience she has."