Source: https://www.fritzpollard.org/leadership/
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 05:20:34+00:00

Document:
Born on December 5, 1936 in Riverview, Texas, John attended Carlsbad High School in Carlsbad, New Mexico. He is a graduate of the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado with a Bachelor of Science degree in Education.
Drafted in 1959 by the Cleveland Browns, his addition to the team proved to be one of the most important drafts in the history of the Cleveland Browns. John played for the Cleveland Browns from 1959 to 1967, then the Washington Redskins from 1967 to 1968. During the off seasons of 1960-1963 he was a junior high school teacher at Addison Junior High School in Cleveland, Ohio.
John’s NFL career did not stop on the field. He continued by becoming the Director of Pro Scouting with the Dallas Cowboys from 1975 to 1991. He created Player Programs/Player Development programs for the NFL in 1991. He served as Vice President/Player Personnel for the Philadelphia Eagles in 1992 and also served as Assistant Director, Pro/College Scouting for the Baltimore Ravens until his retirement in 2002.
John has been involved with the NFL for over forty years and currently serves as the Chairman of the Fritz Pollard Alliance. He is also the President of Wooten Printing and an Independent Associate of Ignite/Stream Energy, located in Dallas, Texas.
Honors include All State Football and Basketball in high school, Associated Press All-Big Seven, All American Honors at Offensive Guard at the University of Colorado in 1958. He was named to the Chicago Tribune’s College All Star Game in 1959, Sporting News NFL All Star Team in 1965, named to the NFL Pro Team teams in 1966 and 1967, Cleveland Browns All-Time All-Star Team in 1979, and University of Colorado’s All-Century Football in 1989. He was inducted into the Texas Black Sports Hall of Fame in 2002, Colorado Hall of Fame in 2004 and Colorado Honored Jersey in 2005. In addition, he was inducted into the Cleveland Browns Legends Club in November 2010, elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 2013 and in 2018 was inducted into the New Mexico Hall of Fame. He also has three NFL World Championship rings.
John has a deep commitment to the communities in which he has lived and understands the value of giving back. He has served on the Board of Directors of Big Brothers in Cleveland, Ohio, Member of City Planning Commission in Cleveland and has been awarded the William O. Walker Community Excellence Honoree in 2002 in Cleveland and was a member of the National Minority Economic Development Council under the Johnson Administration. John is a member of Saint Maria Goretti Catholic Church in Arlington, Texas.
John and his wife, Juanita, currently reside in Arlington, Texas. They have five children together: Adrienne, Gina, Jennifer, Lynette, John David (deceased – May 10, 2009); five grandchildren, Lauren, Gabriel, Michael, Quentin and Sydney and one great grandson, Amani.
Harry Carson’s 13-year stint with the New York Football Giants was one of the longest tenures in club history. The former linebacker played in 173 games and served as Team Captain for 10 of his 13 seasons including the 1986 season when the Giants defeated the Denver Broncos 39-20 in Super Bowl XXI. Once rated the #1 “Inside Linebacker” in NFL history according to Pro Football Weekly, Carson was named to the NFL All-Rookie Team after his first season. Subsequently, during his NFL career, he was named to the All-NFL Team 7 times, the All-NFC Team 8 times, and NFC Linebacker of the Year twice. He once made an amazing 25 tackles in a Monday Night Football Game against the Green Bay Packers. With performances like that he was selected by his peers to play in the NFC-AFC Pro Bowl 9 times. He is among the top 250 players to ever play professional football with his induction as the 231st member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Bill Belichick an assistant coach for the Giants for 12 years considers Carson “the best all-around linebacker” he ever coached!
Carson set the pace for his outstanding career while a student at South Carolina State University where he earned a Bachelor of Science Degree in Education. He continued his graduate studies at South Carolina State and Fairleigh Dickinson University. Before college, Harry Carson attended Wilson Senior High and McClenaghan High Schools in Florence, South Carolina. There he served as Senior Class President, Co-Chairman of the school’s Bi-Racial Committee and ROTC Commander.
The end of Carson’s professional football career marked the beginning of his career in Sports Broadcasting. Retiring from the NFL after the 1988 season, Carson co-hosted CNN’s NFL Preview, he appeared on WCBS-TV as a Broadcast Analyst and he was a Special Correspondent for playoff and Super Bowl on ABC-TV’s Good Morning America. Carson has worked as a Broadcast Analyst with ABC Sports College Football as well as New York’s Madison Square Garden Network. He is currently a Co-Host of the New York Giants game day magazine program Giants 1st & 10.
Carson is CEO and President of Harry Carson Inc. a Sports Consulting and Promotions Company. In that role, his company works with media outlets, educational sources and corporations on sports as well as non-sports related issues. Harry Carson Inc. provides expert television, radio, print media and internet commentary on sports related matters. His company is a provider of former professional athletes to schools and corporations to deliver motivational and inspirational sports theme presentations.
Carson also serves as Executive Director of the Fritz Pollard Alliance. The Alliance is an organization that represents all National Football League Minority Coaches, Coordinators, Scouts, Player Personnel and Game Day Officials dedicated to creating a greater sense of racial and gender diversity in non-player roles within the National Football League.
He is affiliated with many organizations and is involved with numerous charities such as The Miami Project, the Buoniconti Fund to Cure Paralysis, The Adler Aphasia Foundation, The United Way of New York City, The United Way’s Celebrity Read Program, The Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Boys Scouts of America, The Literacy Council of New Jersey, Habitat for Humanity, The Tomorrow’s Children Fund, MANetc, Inc. and The Autism Coalition.
Carson was recognized with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 2015. He is an honorary member of Phi Theta Kappa International Society and serves on the Advisory Board of New York University Law School Sports and Society Program.
Utilizing his education background, Harry Carson has long been an advocate on health related issues. He has served as a spokesperson for the Bergen County, New Jersey Cancer Education and Early Detection Program and with the Professional Football Hall of Fame to increase the awareness of prostate cancer among men, especially Asian, Latino and African American Men.
Currently Harry has partnered with Hackensack Meridian Health System Inc. in the role of "celebrity spokesperson" to increase health and wellness awareness in Northern New Jersey. His role with HMHS includes working with community groups in regard to neurological education promoting prevention, early detection and treatment (if necessary) by the Hackensack Meridian Neuroscience program. Carson is credited with being one of the very first former professional athletes to draw attention to the association of concussions (mild traumatic brain injuries) with neurological abnormalities in those who have participated in contact sports or have served in the military. In past years he has served as an Advisor to the Congress of Neurological Surgeons and as a member of the Brain Injury Association’s Sports Injury Prevention Council. Former NJ Governor Christine Whitman appointed Carson as a member of the New Jersey Advisory Council on Traumatic Brain Injury. Through education and his own personal experiences he has established himself as an open, extremely honest, very knowledgeable internationally recognized source on Concussions in Sports.
In a “lifetime” effort to “make a difference” in the lives of others, Harry Carson has worked with organizations like the Aplastic Anemia Foundation to help provide scholarships to young people who have battled rare blood disorders much like his son Donald in 2006. He has given his time and energies hosting charity golf tournaments to benefit other “various” causes. From 2006 – 2008 he hosted the Harry Carson Celebrity Golf Tournament benefiting The School Foundation, a charity that supports educational programs in his hometown of Florence, South Carolina. He has also given his time hosting the Rival Golf Challenge in New Jersey benefitting the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation Scholarship Fund.
In 2015 he was presented the Lalia Rach Profile in Excellence Award by New York University Tisch Institute for Sports Management, Media and Business, NYU Sports Business Society and NYU Graduate Sports Business Society. He was also honored with the Children’s Ambassador Award by Wynona’s House Child Advocacy Center as well as a David Award recipient by Networking Magazine that year. Other recognitions include Man of the Year by the Walter Camp Football Foundation in 2012. He was also honored by the Mental Health Association of New York City and he was the recipient of the 2012 MVP Award honoring Lifetime Achievement by the United Way of New York City.
Harry Carson is married to Maribel and is the father to Aja Carson-Gurley (m/Andrew, Jamison & Kellen), Dr. Donald Carson and Lucky Carson.
Cyrus Mehri is a founding partner of the law firm Mehri & Skalet, PLLC. Mr. Mehri has served as co-lead class counsel in some of the largest and most significant race and gender cases in U.S. history: Roberts v. Texaco Inc., ($176 million; S.D.N.Y. 1997); Ingram v. The Coca-Cola Company ($192 million; N.D. Ga. 2001); Robinson v. Ford Motor Company ($10 million and 279 apprentice positions; S.D. Ohio 2005); August-Johnson v. Morgan Stanley ($47 million; D.D.C. 2007); Amachoev v. Smith Barney ($34 million; N.D. Cal. 2008); Norflet v. John Hancock Life Insurance Co. ($24 million; D. Conn. 2009), Carter v. Wells Fargo Advisors, LLC ($32 million; D.D.C. 2011) and Brown v. Medicis ($7.2 million; D.D.C 2015, sexual harassment class action case). The hallmark of these settlements is innovative programmatic relief, including the creation of new selection procedures for advancement.
Mr. Mehri also helped create the “Rooney Rule” which has resulted in a record number of minority head coaches and general managers in the National Football League. In addition, he helped to develop the NFL Player Assessment Test which assesses the non-physical, cognitive and psychological attributes of prospective NFL players. In 2003, Mr. Mehri co-founded the Fritz Pollard Alliance, a not-for-profit dedicated to diversity in the NFL coaching, scouting and front office ranks. Mr. Mehri has served as counsel for this not-for-profit for over ten years.
Mr. Mehri served as co-lead counsel in the Pars Equality Center case challenging the Trump Travel Ban, and was cited favorably by both Supreme Court dissents.
N. Jeremi Duru, a Professor of Law at American University’s Washington College of Law, serves as “of counsel” to the Fritz Pollard Alliance. Before entering academia, Professor Duru was an associate at Mehri & Skalet, PLLC in Washington, DC.
Professor Duru is among the nation’s foremost sports law authorities. He is a co-author of one of the field’s premier casebooks, Sports Law and Regulation: Cases and Materials (4th edition) (Wolters Kluwer), as well as one of the field’s premier explorations of sports agency, The Business of Sports Agents (3rd edition) (U. of Penn Press). In addition, he is the sole author of Advancing the Ball: Race, Reformation, and the Quest for Equal Coaching Opportunity in the NFL (Oxford University Press), which examines the NFL’s movement toward increased equality of opportunity for coaches and front office personnel.
Professor Duru is active in the national sports law community, serving as a member of the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s Anti-Doping Review Board and the National Sports Law Institute’s Board of Advisors, but he also frequently lectures and consults abroad. Among other international engagements, Professor Duru has taught and studied on a Fulbright Fellowship at Faculdades Integradas Helio Alonso in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and has served as a visiting professor at the University of Sydney in Sydney, Australia and the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, China.
Professor Duru is widely recognized for his excellence as both an advocate and a teacher. He has received the National Bar Association’s Sports and Entertainment Lawyer of the Year Award as well as the American University Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching and the Washington College of Law Award for Excellence in Teaching. In addition, before joining the WCL faculty, while teaching at Temple Law School, Professor Duru received Temple’s George P. Williams Outstanding Law Professor of the Year Award.
Professor Duru received his undergraduate education at Brown University and then completed a joint-degree program at Harvard University, receiving a Master’s degree in Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government and a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School. Upon graduation, Professor Duru served as a law clerk to the Honorable Damon J. Keith of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Professor Duru is a frequent media contributor and has provided commentary for numerous media outlets, including CNN, BBC, NBC, MSNBC, Fox, ESPN, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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