NAACP Legal Defense Fund : Defend, Educate, Empower

In October 2010, LDF filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in AT&T Mobility, LLC v. Vincent and Liza Concepcion.  This case addresses the lawfulness of class-action bans.  Corporations are increasingly using this novel type of contractual provision...

In 2011, LDF began representing a group of nine African-American longshoremen, members of International Longshoremen’s Union, Local 333 who work on the Port of Baltimore, one of the busiest and fastest growing ports in the country.  The longshoremen filed charges with the U.S. Equal...

LDF's Economic Justice Program has filed a class action lawsuit, Cogdell v. Wet Seal, alleging that top executives at Wet Seal directed senior managers to get rid of African American store management employees for the sake of its “brand image,” and to hire more white employees....

LDF filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Supreme Court case, Department of Health and Human Services v. Florida, on the constitutionality of the minimum essential coverage provision, which requires persons covered by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) to...

Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., was originally filed in 2001 on behalf of a class of an estimated 1.5 million women affected by Wal-Mart’s discriminatory employment practices, making it one of the largest civil rights class action lawsuits in history. The women assert that pay and...

On January 19, 2005, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) filed an amicus brief supporting the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Section 8(a) program. The program is an educational and training initiative designed to support and increase business opportunities for...

In August 2009, LDF filed a friend-of-the-court brief defending the constitutionality of the North Carolina’s Minority and Women Business Enterprise (M/WBE) Program for state-funded road construction projects. The North Carolina General Assembly reauthorized its M/WBE Program in 2006,...

John Hithon worked at a Tyson Foods plant in Gadsden, Alabama for 13 years. Despite his experience, when two supervisor jobs opened up at his plant he was passed over, remaining stuck in lower management. Instead, two white men from other plants were hired. Hithon believed his supervisor...

Dickson County appeared to be an idyllic, rural community of rolling farmland in north-central Tennessee. But decades of toxic dumping at a landfill poisoned the groundwater, and left three generations of a local African-American family who live next to the landfill searching for justice.