Sikh Coalition

What it is: The Sikh Coalition is the largest Sikh civil rights organisation in the United States. Wikipedia says volunteers formed it on the night of 11 September 2001, under the name Coalition of Sikh Organizations of New York, as attacks on Sikh Americans began. Its own site says it ran on volunteers in its early years and hired its first staff member, a legal director, in 2003. Its national office is in New York, with staff in California, Illinois and Washington, DC. Jyotswaroop Kaur is its executive director.

Why it began: On 15 September 2001 Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas station owner in Mesa, Arizona, was shot dead by Frank Silva Roque, who mistook his turban and beard for signs that he was an Arab Muslim and wanted revenge for the attacks. Roque was convicted of first-degree murder in 2003. Sodhi’s case is among the first of the retaliatory attacks that followed 11 September (Wikipedia).

Key moments

• Early years: by its own account it filed 32 profiling complaints against the TSA.
• 2011: it wrote to the US Attorney General asking that the FBI count hate crimes against Sikhs. More than 130 senators and members of Congress later backed the demand.
• 5 August 2012: a white supremacist killed six worshippers at the gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. The local police chief pointed out that the FBI’s form had no anti-Sikh category.
• 2013 and 2015: the FBI’s Advisory Policy Board voted to add anti-Sikh and other categories in 2013, and on 25 March 2015 the Sikh Coalition welcomed a revised FBI training manual, the first to mention Sikhs. The first anti-Sikh figures appeared in the 2015 hate crime report, and the FBI reported 89 anti-Sikh hate crimes for 2020 (SPLC).
• Military and schools: by its own account it won a legal victory that doubled religious accommodations for Sikh soldiers and later secured updated US Army rules, and it won anti-bullying protections covering over 100,000 children, along with a settlement in a New York City school case.

Where it stands: Its programmes now include the Junior Sikh Coalition, a gurdwara security project and the FlyRights app. It works in the courts, with the federal agencies and in Congress, and is separate from the Canadian and Punjab-focused bodies such as the World Sikh Organization of Canada.