President Biden Announces Seven Key Nominations

WASHINGTON – Today, President Joe Biden announced his intent to nominate the following seven individuals to serve in key roles:

• Carlos Del Toro, Nominee for Secretary of the Navy
• Sandra Bruce, Nominee for Inspector General of the Department of Education
• Carlton Waterhouse, Nominee for Assistant Administrator of Land and Emergency Management, Environmental Protection Agency
• Margaret Burnham, Nominee for Member of the Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board
• Clayborne Carson, Nominee for Member of the Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board
• Gabrielle Dudley, Nominee for Member of the Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board
• Henry Klibanoff, Nominee for Member of the Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board

Carlos Del Toro, Nominee for Secretary of the Navy

Carlos Del Toro is a retired Commander in the U.S. Navy with nearly 40 years’ experience in national security and naval operations, budgeting, and acquisition. Over the course of a 22-year career in the U.S. Navy, Del Toro held a series of critical appointments – including Senior Executive Assistant to the Director for Program Analysis and Evaluation in the Office of the Secretary of Defense; First Commanding Officer of the guided missile destroyer USS Bulkeley; and Special Assistant to the Director and Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget – before founding SBG Technology Solutions, Inc. He has served as CEO and President of SBG Technology Solutions for the last 17 years. As CEO and President of SBG Technology Solutions, Del Toro has supported defense programs across a host of immediate and long-term Navy issue areas, including shipbuilding, AI, cybersecurity, acquisition programs, space systems, health, and training. Having earned a Masters in National Security Studies from the Naval War College and a Masters in Legislative Affairs from George Washington University, Del Toro has also supported military programs addressing policy and strategic studies.

Born in Havana, Cuba, Carlos Del Toro immigrated to the U.S. with his family as refugees in 1962. Raised in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City, he attended public schools and received an appointment to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, where he earned a Bachelor of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering. He was the first Hispanic President of the White House Fellows Foundation and Alumni association and serves on the Board of Directors of the Stimson Center. He was recently appointed to the U.S. Naval Academy Alumni Association’s Special Commission on Culture, Diversity, and Inclusion. Del Toro is married to Betty Del Toro, with whom they have four children and a granddaughter.

Sandra Bruce, Nominee for Inspector General of the Department of Education

Sandra D. Bruce, Acting Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education Office of Inspector General, is a results-oriented leader with more than 30 years of experience directing, overseeing, managing, and conducting complex audit, inspections, and investigative-related programs. Bruce joined the OIG in 2014 as Deputy Inspector General and has been leading the office since 2018 when Inspector General Kathleen S. Tighe retired.

Prior to joining OIG, Bruce was the Assistant Inspector General for Inspections at the U.S. Department of Energy, a position she also held at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009. From 1997 to 2006, Bruce was a leader with the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General, directing its Law Enforcement and Postal Service Security unit and its Computer Assisted Audit Techniques unit. From 1986 to 1997, Bruce was with the U.S. Army Audit Agency, where she began her public service career as an auditor, rising to an Audit Supervisor and Associate Program Director. Bruce was also a Legislative Fellow for Senator Carl Levin.

Acting Inspector General Bruce has received numerous awards for her work, including a Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) Award for Excellence, Distinguished Achievement Awards, Exceptional Performance Award, and is a recipient of the Excellence in Government Leadership Award presented by the Association of Government Accountants-Philadelphia Chapter. Bruce is active in the inspector general community, currently serving as a member of Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC) where she chairs the PRAC’s GAO and State and Local Oversight Subcommittee and is a member of the PRAC’s Financial Sector Work Group. Bruce also serves as chair of the new CIGIE Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Work Group, and is a member of the CIGIE Audit Committee and CIGIE Information Technology Committee. Bruce previously served on the CIGIE Deputy Inspector General Work Group and the Intelligence Community Inspector General’s Assistant Inspectors General for Inspections Work Group.

Bruce earned her Master of Science in Information Systems from Hawaii Pacific University and her Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with a Concentration in Accounting from Fayetteville State University.

Carlton Waterhouse, Nominee for Assistant Administrator of Land and Emergency Management, Environmental Protection Agency

Carlton Waterhouse is an international expert on environmental law and environmental justice, as well as reparations and redress for historic injustices. He has lectured globally on climate justice and group-based inequality. In 2019, he testified before the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States, and in 2018 he completed a Fulbright research fellowship in Brazil examining race and police violence. His views have been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other media outlets. His scholarship includes essays, articles, and book chapters focused on the ethical and legal dimensions of environmental justice and reparations. After completing law school, Dr. Waterhouse began his career as an attorney with the United States Environmental Protection Agency where he served in the Office of Regional Counsel in Atlanta, Georgia and the Office of General Counsel in Washington, D.C. While at the EPA, he served as the chief legal counsel for the agency in several significant cases and as a national and regional expert on environmental justice, earning three of the Agency’s prestigious national awards.

Dr. Waterhouse earned a Ph.D. in Social Ethics from Emory University. He is also a graduate of the Howard University School of Law, the Candler School of Divinity and the Pennsylvania State University. He is currently on a leave of absence from the Howard University School of Law where he serves as a Professor of Law and as the inaugural director the school’s Environmental Justice Center which is under development. Before joining the Howard University faculty in 2019, he served as a Professor of Law at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law where he directed the Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources Law Program. Drawing from his unique background, Dr. Waterhouse examines civil rights, human rights, and environmental issues from a multidisciplinary approach. He actively participates in national, local, and international organizations protecting civil rights and addressing environmental issues. In February 2021, he was appointed to serve in the Biden-Harris Administration as the Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Office of Land and Emergency Management at the EPA.

Margaret Burnham, Nominee for Member of the Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board

Margaret Burnham has served as a state court judge (appointed by Governor Michael Dukakis, 1977), civil rights lawyer, and human rights commissioner. A graduate of Tougaloo College in Jackson, MS and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, she has been on the Northeastern University faculty since 2002.  She was named to the 2016 class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows, an honor recognizing a select group of scholars for their significant work in the social sciences and humanities. 

Professor Burnham views her work as part of a global reconceptualization that seeks to historicize personal memory by connecting citizens to the past in ways that inform the ongoing conversation about the present. In this democratizing project to create an inclusive and authentic national history, the distinctive role of researchers is to provide accurate accounts of past events. If well carried out, the work should clarify events and experiences, yield new readings of the past, and alter understandings about present imperatives.

Clayborne Carson, Nominee for Member of the Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board

Clayborne Carson has devoted most of his professional life to the study of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the movements King inspired. Since receiving his doctorate from UCLA in 1975, Dr. Carson has taught at Stanford University, where he is Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor of History (Emeritus). In 1985 the late Coretta Scott King invited Dr. Carson to direct a long-term project to edit and publish the authoritative edition of her late husband’s speeches, sermons, correspondence, publications, and unpublished writings. Under Carson’s direction, the King Papers Project has produced seven volumes of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. In 2005 Carson founded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute to endow and expand the educational outreach of the King Papers Project. Although he is completing his final year directing the King Institute, he will continue his research and teaching as a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Born in Buffalo, New York, Dr. Carson spent his childhood years in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where his father worked as a security inspector at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. Since moving to Los Angeles in 1964 to attend UCLA, he has resided in California. As a student, he participated in civil rights and antiwar protests, and many of his subsequent writings reflect these experiences by stressing the importance of grassroots organizing and nonviolent resistance to injustice within the African-American freedom struggle

Dr. Carson has been married for more than five decades to Susan Ann Carson, who until her retirement in 2008 was the managing editor of the King Papers Project. His son, Malcolm, graduated from Howard University and the University of California’s Boalt School of Law and is Senior Vice President and General Counsel for the Trust for Public Land in San Francisco. His daughter Temera graduated from San Jose State University with a master’s degree in social work and is a social work supervisor for the County of Santa Clara, California. His grand-daughter Dalila Adofo is a project coordinator of San Francisco’s Southeast Community Council for Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates.

Gabrielle Dudley, Nominee for Member of the Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board

Gabrielle M. Dudley is Instruction Archivist at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University. In this role, she partners with faculty and other instructors to develop courses and archives research assignments for both undergraduate and graduate students. She has taught courses on archives reference, access, and outreach for Clayton State University and courses on Black print culture for the California Rare Book School. She has authored several professional articles on the intersection of pedagogy and archives including the book chapter “For When They Arrive: Using Black Women Writers Collections to Advance Engagement in Special Collections Libraries” forthcoming in Critical Ethnic Studies in Academic and Research Libraries.

Gabrielle is a founding member of the Atlanta Black Archives Alliance and has held leadership positions in the Society of American Archivists, Society of Georgia Archivists, and the Rare Book and Manuscript Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).  Gabrielle earned her M.A. in Public History and MLIS with a concentration in Archival Studies and Preservation Management from the University of South Carolina. She also holds a B.A. in History from the University of Montevallo.

Henry Klibanoff, Nominee for Member of the Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board

Hank Klibanoff, a veteran journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize in History in 2007 for a book he co-wrote about the news coverage of the civil rights struggle in the South, is the creator and host of Buried Truths, a narrative history podcast produced by WABE (NPR) in Atlanta. A native of Florence, Alabama, Klibanoff joined Emory at the close of a 36-year career in newspapers in Mississippi and at The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he was managing editor for news. He is a professor of practice in the Creative Writing Program at Emory, where he teaches non-fiction.

Klibanoff and his co-author, Gene Roberts, won the Pulitzer Prize in history for their book, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation, published by Knopf (2006), Vintage (2007) and Brilliance Audio (2007). The Race Beat explores news coverage of civil rights from the 1930s through the late 1960s, particularly the impact of the black press, the Northern press, the Southern liberal and segregationist press, television and photojournalism. Buried Truths, his podcast, focused in Season 1 on Isaiah Nixon, a black farmer in Alston, Georgia, who was killed by two white men on Election Day in 1948 after he voted in defiance of threats. The second season was about A.C. Hall, a black 17-year old who was shot in the back and killed by two white police officers in Macon, Georgia, in 1962 after a white woman misidentified him. Season 3 went outside the modern civil rights era to examine the shooting death last February of Ahmaud Arbery of Brunswick, Georgia; he was jogging through a neighborhood when he was shot and killed as three white men in two trucks chased him.

Klibanoff spent six years as a reporter in Mississippi, three years at The Boston Globe and 20 years at The Philadelphia Inquirer, three of which were as the Midwest correspondent based in Chicago. Between Mississippi and Boston, he took a year to backpack in Europe and the Middle East. He joined TheAtlanta Journal-Constitution as managing editor for news in 2002 and left the paper in 2008, after which he joined Emory. Klibanoff and his wife, Laurie A. Leonard, who is a speech therapist, have three daughters: Caroline, Eleanor, and Corinne.

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