Biography
Ría Thompson-Washington (they/themme/elle) is an Afro-Latine, nonbinary Femme living in Washington, DC. In San Antonio, where they spent a lot of time growing up, Ría supported local houseless people by organizing food drops with the community group, “Food Not Bombs.” After Hurricane Katrina, Ría volunteered in the efforts to support newly displaced New Orleanians in Texas through clothing and food drives. Then, they joined the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in 2006 in San Antonio, TX as a community organizer empowering city and county employees who, under “Right to Work '' laws, were fighting to form a staff union. Later, Ría canvassed with the Texas Campaign for the Environment and Obama for America in 2008 (Austin, Texas), to fundraise to prevent landfills in largely Black and Brown communities and help elect the country’s first Black president. Ría has spent their career working on various campaigns in many different capacities as a trainer, facilitator, fundraiser, activist, artist, and organizer, to name a few.
In 2011, Ría enrolled at San Antonio College (SAC) as a political science major after nearly a decade of organizing. At SAC, Ría first began organizing to support municipal, state, and federal elections. On campus, Ría was active in student life and culture. As a member of the Black Student Alliance, they pushed to create the infrastructure for SAC’s ambassador program, brought electoral candidates to campus to speak to students, and registered students to vote. Ría worked as a writing tutor in The Writing Center. While at SAC, Ría secured a political science internship with the then Bexar County Democratic Party Chair, Choco Gonzalez Meza, who introduced them to (then soon to be) Congressman Joaquin Castro.
When Ría arrived in D.C. in 2012 to complete their Baccalaureate degree at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC), they continued to be an active, involved, and engaged student. Ría organized UDC students to lobby the city council for more resources for the University; organized student town halls with the University Board of Directors, and petitioned University administration for more opportunities for student input. In January 2013, Ría started working in San Antonio Congressman Castro’s D.C. office on Capitol Hill as a legislative intern. In the Spring of 2014, Ría graduated from the University of the District of Columbia and was admitted to the David A. Clarke School of Law at UDC.
At UDC Law that fall, Ría continued petitioning UDC’s administration to support the students. They joined the National Lawyers Guild in 2015 as a student member of the bar association. At the Guild’s annual convention in Oakland, they were elected to the position of national vice president. In 2016, Ría left law school after the death of their mother, but continued their advocacy and legal work as they joined the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., as a legal assistant and paralegal on the Litigation team. Simultaneously, Ría was elected as the executive vice president of the National Lawyers Guild. Since 2016, Ría has been a Legal Observer Coordinator and trainer in the DC Chapter, where they are also a Board member. NLG is where Ría learned to pair teaching mass defense strategy with the corresponding legal remedies to support protesters and activists who are in or have taken to the streets to redress their grievances with their government.
In 2018, Ría joined the staff at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law as a Senior National Organizer in their Voting Rights Project. They spent the next two years training poll monitors, organizing election support for communities, and building Election Protection programs for civic engagement organizations across the South. In preparation for the 2020 election cycle at the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), Ría created the Voter Guardian program after listening to communities describe their concerns about voting in a pandemic under a hostile federal government. When CPD’s affiliate in Georgia needed support with the onslaught of help coming from outside organizations during the Senate Runoff, Ría was tapped to serve at the request of the executive director of the New Georgia Project, as the Chief of Staff and managing partnerships throughout the campaign.
Ría was awarded Legal Worker of the Year (2021-22) by the NLG. In early 2021, Hulu made a short documentary about Ría’s work. In addition to being the president of the National Lawyers Guild, Ría currently serves as a member of the Mass Defense Steering Committee and is an active member of the Legal Worker Caucus, Queer Caucus, and the United People of Color Caucus.
