NAACP Legal Defense Fund : Defend, Educate, Empower

Fisher v. UT Austin is the first federal litigation challenging the use of race in university admissions since the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in ...

In 2006, just days after President Bush signed into law the bill reauthorizing core provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a small water district in Austin, Texas filed a federal lawsuit in Washington, D.C. challenging the preclearance provision known as Section 5 of the Act. ...

An African-American Community in Texas is Victimized by the "War on Drugs"

On July 23, 1999, more than ten percent of Tulia's African-American population was arrested as the result of a drug "sting" conducted by a lone police officer with a...

Mariano Rosales spent more than 23 years on Texas’s death row after being convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death by a Harris County (Houston) jury from which African Americans and Latinos were excluded because of their race.  Between 1985 and 2008, Mr. Rosales...

In June 2003, the Supreme Court issued landmark rulings in two companion cases, Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger.  In Grutter, the Court rebuffed a constitutional challenge to the use of race in admissions to the University of Michigan Law School....

On September 17, 2008, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Williams v. Allen, 542 F.3d 1326 (11th Cir. 2008), vacated the death sentence of LDF client, Herbert Williams, who had spent almost 20 years on Alabama’s death row.  LDF litigated the case with co-counsel from...

In court papers filed in 2001, current and former employees of the New York City Parks Department alleged that African-American and Latino employees Parks workers had been denied equal employment opportunities. As a result of long-term, systemic discrimination throughout the Parks Department...

On October 24, 2008, LDF settled a lawsuit filed just two days earlier, and designed to protect the voting rights of foreclosure victims. The suit, Herring v. Marion County Election Board, was filed in Indiana state court to ensure that eligible voters who may have faced the threat of...

In June 2003, LDF filed a class action lawsuit, Gonzalez v. Abercrombie & Fitch Stores, against national clothing retailer, Abercrombie & Fitch. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, charged that in addition to selling so-called "classic" looks, Abercrombie...

For many months after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck the City of New Orleans, residents struggled to return home. Displaced residents found themselves navigating a maze of obstacles: securing affordable housing in a safe neighborhood, obtaining gainful employment at a living wage and with...