In an oral history at Duke University, Earls described how her white mother and black father moved to Seattle, Washington in the late 1950s because at that time it was illegal for them to be married in Missouri, where they had met. Her mother was a nurse, and her father was a urological technician. She and her brother were both adoptees. Earls' first six years in Seattle were spent in a black neighborhood, following which her family integrated a previously all-white neighborhood. In the racially turbulent 1960s, Earls said, "I always had this great fear that because my family looked the way we did, with my brother looking more black than I did, that if we were ever in a neighborhood and a riot broke out, people wouldn’t know that we were a family. And it felt like the wrong people would be trying to hurt us." Attending Williams College, where she majored in political economy and philosophy, "people knew I wasn’t quite white, but they didn’t really know what I was." Upon graduation she received a Thomas J. Watson fellowship to study the role of women in Ujamaa villages in Tanzania, but her time there was cut short by multiple bouts of malaria. She moved to England, worked in a solicitor's office there, and married her first husband. Three years later she returned to the United States to attend Yale Law School because "I had this burning desire to be a lawyer and to try to bring about change I wanted to work on issues of racism in the U.S." During her law school studies she gave birth to her first child.
Career
Following her graduation from Yale Law School, in 1988 Earls was recruited by civil rights champion James Ferguson II to join North Carolina's first integrated law firm, Ferguson, Stein, Watt, Wallas, Adkins & Gresham, where she practiced civil rights litigation first as an associate and later as partner. In 1998 Earls was appointed by President Bill Clinton to serve as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. After serving as director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights' voting rights project and as director of advocacy at the University of North Carolina Center for Civil Rights, in 2007 she founded the Southern Coalition For Social Justice in Durham, NC, a 501 nonprofit organization whose team of lawyers, social scientists, community organizers and media specialists "partners with communities of color and economically disadvantaged communities in the south to defend and advance their political, social and economic rights through the combination of legal advocacy, research, organizing and communications." There she served as SCSJ's founding executive director, stepping down in 2017 to run for Associate Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court. While at SCSJ, Earls represented clients in several notable voting rights lawsuits, including serving as lead plaintiffs' attorney in North Carolina v. Covington, a landmark case ultimately rising to the U.S. Supreme Court which, in 2017, affirmed that 28 of North Carolina’s state house and senate districts were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. A federal court then ordered a special master to redraw the districts' boundaries for the 2018 election in which, under the new maps, state Democrats broke the legislature's nearly decade-long Republican supermajority.
