(Sterling, Virginia) Linda Chavez, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, praised President Bush’s announcement yesterday that he is nominating Gerald Reynolds to be the new chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and Abigail Thernstrom to be the new vice chairman. Chavez was the commission’s staff director during the Reagan administration from 1983-1985.

“Reynolds and Thernstrom are first-rate choices,” said Chavez. “Reynolds has a distinguished career in both public and private practice.” Chavez singled out, in particular, Reynolds’s service as legal counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity from 1995-1997 and as the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Education Department in the Bush administration’s first term.

“Abigail Thernstrom is a brilliant social scientist and a dear personal friend,” Chavez continued. Thernstrom’s works include Whose Votes Count?: Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible, and No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. Thernstrom has been on the Commission since 2000, and is on the Center for Equal Opportunity’s board of directors.

The Center for Equal Opportunity is a nonprofit, Section 501(c)(3) nonpartisan research and educational organization based in Sterling, Virginia; it studies public policy issues involving race and ethnicity.