Clarke's parents immigrated to Brooklyn from Jamaica. She has said that she “grew up in a household that was about discipline, working hard in school and about making the most of every opportunity”. Clarke was a member of Prep for Prep, a non-profit organisation that looks to support students of colour in accessing private school education. She attended Choate Rosemary Hall, where she was the only girl to join the boy's wrestling squad. Clarke earned her bachelor's degree at Harvard University, where she was involved with initiatives to support and champion African-American students, and graduated in 1997. She moved to Columbia University for her graduate studies, where she completed a Juris Doctor in 2000. After graduating she worked as a trial attorney in the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. In this capacity, she served as a federal prosecutor and worked on voting rights, hate crimes and human trafficking cases.
Career
In 2006 Clarke joined the NAACP, where she led the political participation group in the Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Her work at the NAACP focussed on election law reform. In 2011 Clarke was appointed Director of the Civil Rights bureau of then Attorney General of New York, Eric Schneiderman, where she led initiatives on criminal justice issues and housing discrimination. Under her initiative, the bureau reached agreements with retailers on racial profiling of their customers, police departments on policy reformer and with school districts on the school-to-prison pipeline. In 2015 Clarke was appointed president and Executive Director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. One of her first roles was leading Election Protection, a voter protection coalition which looks to ensure all American voters have access to the ballot box. She became well known for her work combating the discrimination faced by marginalised communities. In 2019 Clarke represented Taylor Dumpson, the first African-American woman student body President of American University, in her lawsuit against white supremacists. The day after Dumpson was inaugurated as president, neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin coordinated a series of hate crimes on campus, including hanging nooses with bananas tied to them around campus. He then directed his followers to harass her on social media, a so-called "troll storm". Clarke successfully fought for the United States District Court for the District of Columbia to recognise that hateful online trolling can interfere with access to public accommodation, as well as securing damages and a restraining order. In early 2020 Clarke became concerned that African-American communities would be disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. She believed that the social determinants of health could explain why Black communities were so much more likely to contract severe forms of coronavirus disease, including that individuals in this group were less likely to be able to work from home, more vulnerable to losing their health insurance if they didn't go to work and more likely to suffer chronic diseases like hypertension. In the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, Kristen Clarke described the pandemic, record rates of unemployment and racial injustice caused by police brutality as a “perfect storm” for social unrest in the United States.
