Tafeni English

Tafeni L. English is the director of the SPLC’s Civil Rights Memorial Center (CRMC) in Montgomery, Alabama. The CRMC is an interpretive center that provides visitors with a deeper understanding of the civil rights movement and includes the Civil Rights Memorial, which honors 40 men, women and children killed during the movement. In addition to overseeing the CRMC, English regularly travels across the country to speak about combating hate and extremism.

English first joined the SPLC in 1997 as a research analyst for the Intelligence Project. She later served as the first director of Teaching Tolerance’s Mix It Up program, which encourages schoolchildren to identify, question and cross social boundaries by sitting with someone new in the school cafeteria. English later worked for another Montgomery-based civil rights organization before returning to the SPLC in 2019. She has a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Troy University, where she also earned a master’s degree in counseling and psychology.