Victor is an Assistant General Counsel in the national NAACP office. He is licensed to practice law in Texas and Ohio. While he spent a great deal of time on the Association’s Black Bike Week public accommodations discrimination cases in Myrtle Beach, S.C., more recently he has focused on education cases, e.g., Connecticut NAACP’s No Child Left Behind cases, Dayton NAACP’s post-desegregation settlement monitoring case, Omaha NAACP’s attack on segregation. He also drafted an amicus brief for the Reno NAACP in a challenge to the school district’s failure to provide suspended students with meaningful notice and opportunity to be heard. He co-drafted the NAACP amicus in the recent Supreme Court case on the voluntary use of race to make school district student assignments. He has assisted NAACP affiliates with their work to counter the suppression of the black & other minority vote, co-chaired national staff police misconduct workgroup, served as Interim Education Director and works to promote fair housing, particularly for low-income blacks in the context of redevelopment.
Prior to his work on the national staff, he served as lead plaintiffs’ counsel in an Ohio federal class action challenge, subsequently settled, to County and State welfare department treatment of Limited English Proficient Food Stamp Program participants whose primary language is Spanish. His FCC complaint on behalf of the Toledo NAACP led to a fine against the owner of a radio station because of prohibited on-air conduct. In Austin he and co-counsel obtained a state court injunction against the school district in a high-stakes testing case; as a result, about 80 seniors were allowed to participate in graduation ceremonies in district high schools. Victor has written extensively about race and civil rights, e.g., V. Goode & J. Goode, De Facto Zero Tolerance: An Exploratory Study of Race & Safe School Violations, in Teaching City Kids: Understanding & Appreciating Them 85 (Peter Lang 2007). The Harvard Civil Rights Project commissioned Victor and his wife, Jennifer, a sociologist, to present their safe school research at a national conference on zero tolerance & the school to prison pipeline. He’s presented at other conferences, e.g., Annual NBA-NAACP CLE (creative uses of NCLB and civil rights law to address structural racism).
Victor graduated from Thurgood Marshall Law School where he served as Notes Editor for the law journal. He has an MPA from East Texas State University and his BS from West Texas State University. Victor takes guitar lessons and just finished a 353-page manuscript on 19th century race jurisprudence.
