Deval Patrick

governor, D-MA

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick was elected in November of 2006. He brings to the Governor's office a broad range of leadership experience at the top levels of business, government and non-profits. Hoping for the best and working for it, his life has traced a trajectory from the South Side of Chicago to the US Justice Department, Fortune 500 boardrooms, and now the Massachusetts State House. After graduating from Milton, Patrick went on to Harvard, the first in his family to attend college. He received his degree, with honors, in 1978 and spent a post-graduate year working on a United Nations youth training project in the Darfur region of Sudan. He returned to Cambridge to attend Harvard Law School in the fall of 1979, where he lead the Legal Aid Bureau, the nation's oldest student-run legal services organization, and won the Ames Moot Court competition. Following law school, Patrick served as a law clerk to a federal appellate judge before joining the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. In 1986, he joined the Boston law firm of Hill & Barlow and was named partner in 1990, at the age of 34. In 1994, President Clinton appointed Patrick Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, the nation's top civil rights post. At the Justice Department, Patrick worked on a wide range of issues, including prosecution of hate crimes and abortion clinic violence, and enforcement of employment discrimination, fair lending and disabilities rights laws. During his tenure, Patrick led the largest federal criminal investigation before September 11th, coordinating state, local and federal agencies to investigate church burnings throughout the South in the mid-1990s. Governor Patrick has also served on numerous charitable and corporate boards, as well as the Federal Election Reform Commission under Presidents Carter and Ford, and as Vice Chair of the Massachusetts Judicial Nominating Council by appointment of Governor Weld. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees, and is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute. Diane and Deval Patrick have been married for over twenty-five years and have two adult daughters, Sarah and Katherine. The Patrick family has lived in Milton, in a house on Deval's high school paper route, for the last 20 years.