Margaret Huang

Margaret L. Huang is an American human rights and racial justice advocate, and president and chief executive officer of Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an American civil rights nonprofit. She joined the organization in April 2020, taking over a position held for several decades by founder Morris Dees. Biography Raised in East Tennessee, she attended and graduated from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She worked as a teacher for the Close Up Foundation before heading to graduate school at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. After receiving her master's degree and the Javits Fellowship from Columbia, she took a position with the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee working for Senator Claiborne Pell. She worked on foreign policy toward Asia and then Africa, leading a co-del to Kenya, Southern Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Tanzania. Her next jobs were managing a women's rights program for The Asia Foundation; working with human rights defenders from Asia and the Middle East as a Program Director at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights; directing the U.S. Racial Justice program at Global Rights; and leading the Rights Working Group, a coalition of more than 350 organizations committed to protecting civil liberties after September 11. The Rights Working Group led a campaign to enact legislation to ban racial profiling by law enforcement. In April 2012, she joined the Diane Rehm show on NPR to talk about racial profiling in America. She is the author of a chapter "Going Global: Appeals to International and Regional Human Rights Bodies" in Bringing Human Rights Home: A History of Human Rights in the United States, edited by Cynthia Soohoo, Catherine Albisa and Martha F. Davis, 2007. From December 2015 to April 2020, Huang served as executive director of Amnesty International USA. In 2019, she led two international delegations to the U.S.-Mexico border to assess the impact of the Trump administration's policies on refugees. After traveling to Syria to witness the devastation caused by the U.S. bombing, she gave an interview to Democracy Now in May 2019 urging the U.S. government to give reparations to the victims of the bombing.