Edward Blum (litigant)

Edward Blum
Born	Benton Harbor, Michigan
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of Texas (1973)

Edward Blum is a politically conservative legal strategist known for his activism against laws involving race and ethnicity. Blum is not an attorney. He connects potential plaintiffs with attorneys who are willing to represent them in "test cases" which he tries to use to set legal precedents. He is the director and sole member of the Project on Fair Representation, which he founded in 2005. According to its website, the Project focuses specifically on voting rights, education, government contracting, and employment. Since the 1990s, Blum has been heavily involved in bringing six cases to the United States Supreme Court, and the Court has partially or fully ruled in his favor in four of those cases.

Edward Blum was born into a Jewish family in Benton Harbor, Michigan, where his parents owned and operated the local shoe store. Counter to his later political leanings, he describes his parents as generally left-wing liberals who supported Democratic presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and that he was eventually "the first Republican my mother ever met". He attended the University of Texas and the State University of New York, where he briefly studied African literature. Following this, to connect with his Jewish roots he spent a summer in Israel living on a kibbutz which he says caused him to reevaluate some of the liberal positions he had been raised with.

Whilst living as a stock broker in Houston, Texas in the early 80s, he became involved in the neoconservatism movement. In 1990, he realized that the Democratic incumbent in his congressional district, Craig Anthony Washington, was running unopposed, so decided to run against him for the Republican Party. During that campaign, Blum and his wife Lark went door-knocking and realized that the boundaries of their district erratically divided streets based on ethnicity, with the suspected purpose to gerrymander a majority African-American district. Blum eventually lost the congressional race. But he and others filed a lawsuit against the state of Texas, claiming that the racially gerrymandered districts violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The case, Bush v. Vera, went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Blum's favor.

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