Virginia, April 13, 2005
NRI Press
On Sept. 11 attacks, Amandeep Singh Sidhu was run
off the road by an enraged driver in Northern Virginia.
The driver had mistaken Sidhu's turban as a symbol
of the faith of those responsible for the 2001 attacks
on the World Trade Center towers in New York and the
Pentagon.
As a further irony, at the time Sidhu was a business
analyst for a Department of Defense contractor with
a satellite office in the Pentagon.
That episode was hardly the only instance of prejudice
Sidhu has seen since the Sept. 11 attacks. He had
a table flipped on his lap in a restaurant, and a
Richmond restaurant that his family had visited many
times started requiring all patrons to remove any
headwear.
Rather than become angry at such discrimination,
"we've taken it as an opportunity to educate"
Americans about the Sikh faith, said Sidhu, who helped
found the New York-based Sikh coalition.
He became involved in such issues as racial profiling,
post-Sept. 11 security and employment issues and discussions
with videogame manufacturers and filmmakers about
racist portrayals of Sikhs.
Oliver Hill
law award
His efforts led to his selection as the 2005 recipient
of the Virginia State Bar's Oliver W. Hill Law School
Pro Bono Award. The award, named for the Richmond
civil-rights lawyer, is given annually to a law student
in Virginia. Sidhu is a third-year student at the
University of Richmond law school and is president
of the Student Bar Association there.
In nominating Sidhu for the Hill award, UR Law School
Dean Rodney A. Smolla, said, "In my 24 years
of law teaching I can think of no student more deserving
of an award bearing Oliver Hill's name."
Smolla said Sidhu "has spent much of his young
life and all of his law-school career emulating Hill's
devotion to justice, inclusion and civil rights for
all people."
Since he was elected secretary of the Student Bar
Association in his first year of law school, Sidhu
has encouraged all UR law students to perform community
service. Projects include tutoring elementary and
middle-school students in Creighton Court and helping
recently paroled members of that community get their
high school equivalency degrees.
BIOGRAPHY
Amandeep Singh Sidhu was born in Norfolk and grew
up in Chesterfield County, the son of physicians who
emigrated from India in 1976. He graduated from Collegiate
School and majored in economics and government at
the College of William and Mary.
He said he had hoped that his parents' generation
of Sikhs, who came to this country in the 1960s and
1970s, had paved the way so that he would not be a
target of hate crimes.
Prejudice typically reflects a lack of knowledge
of the religion, Sidhu said. "As soon as someone
has a personal relationship with a Sikh," discrimination
vanishes, he said.
A year after completing his undergraduate studies
at The College of William and Mary, Amandeep Singh
Sidhu found his calling in the wake of the terrorist
attacks on New York and Washington.
“As a result of 9/11, the Sikh community faced
a tremendous backlash in the form of hate crimes,
airport profiling and employment discrimination,”
says Amandeep, himself a Sikh-American. He immediately
volunteered with the Sikh Coalition, an entity formed
to unify existing Sikh organizations and create a
national voice for the community through advocacy
and outreach.
This passionate involvement reaffirmed his decision
to attend law school. Through a focus on constitutional
law, Amandeep plans to dedicate his career to promoting
the justice and equality called for by America's framers.
“The pursuit of human liberty and justice in
an ever-changing society places constitutional law
in the realm of cutting-edge legal study,” he
says. “Whether the issue is race, religion, gender,
lifestyle or any other form of social injustice, we
have much work to do as a global society
He plans to clerk for Virginia Court of Appeals Judge
Walter S. Felton after graduating from law school.
