Alanah Odoms

Alanah Odoms is a civil rights attorney, nationally recognized public speaker, and devoted mother to her daughter, Élan Jolie Hebert. As Executive Director of the ACLU of Louisiana, she is the first Black woman to lead the organization in its 70-year history. Since taking the helm on June 4, 2018, she has transformed a two-person affiliate into a twelve-member, multidisciplinary team fighting on the front lines of the nation’s most consequential civil rights battles.

Under her leadership, the ACLU of Louisiana has built a community-centered model of advocacy that restores constitutional rights from the ground up—confronting the enduring legacies of slavery and structural racism in all their forms: racial gerrymandering, mass incarceration, immigrant detention, and discriminatory policing. In a state long ranked among the most gerrymandered in the country, Alanah led a statewide redistricting campaign that mobilized thousands of residents to demand fair representation, winning historic victories that include a second Black congressional district and a second Black seat on the Louisiana Supreme Court—gains that will reshape political power for generations.

Alanah’s advocacy sits at the center of the country’s defining constitutional fights. In Louisiana v. Callais, one of the most important voting rights cases of this generation, the ACLU of Louisiana defended the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments before the Supreme Court. When the Court’s April 2026 decision gutted the Voting Rights Act and opened the door to unchecked gerrymandering, Alanah answered by organizing a Civil Rights–era mobilization to protect minority voting power. In Roake v. Brumley, she led a landmark defense of church-state separation in public schools; though the Fifth Circuit ruled against the ACLU’s clients in February 2026, she and her team continue to pursue every pathway forward. And through a first-of-its-kind habeas corpus project, the organization has worked to free people unjustly held in Louisiana’s immigrant detention centers—reasserting due process and human dignity in a system designed to erase both.

A frequent national commentator on MSNBC and CNN, Alanah is widely regarded as a clear and moral voice in moments of democratic crisis. In July 2027, Broadleaf will publish her book, The Love Amendments: Reclaiming Our Freedom in Turbluent Times, which reframes the Reconstruction Amendments as a living moral framework and argues that love, dignity, and belonging are constitutional imperatives.

Before joining the ACLU, Alanah served as Deputy General Counsel and Director of the Division of Children and Families at the Louisiana Supreme Court. She is a graduate of Rutgers School of Law–Newark and a magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Rutgers College, as well as an alumna of the Presidential Leadership Scholars Program, the Eagleton Institute of Politics, and the Institute for Women’s Leadership. Her honors include the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Award from Rutgers Law School (2022) and the inaugural Torch Lighters Award from the Rutgers College Institute for Women’s Leadership (2025).

Grounded in both joy and justice, Alanah mentors young girls through Girls on the Run, uniting her love of movement, leadership, and the work of cultivating the next generation of courageous changemakers.