Wednesday, December 14, 2016 | news
Sherrilyn Ifill’s keynote speech seemed to make the most impact, as later speakers referred to it several times. Ifill, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, accentuated the positive. In 20 years’ residence on the west side, she said, community involvement and public life left her with “almost entirely positive” memories. […]
Monday, March 18, 2019 | news
Lisa Cylar Barrett and Monique Dixon Take on New Roles The NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) is pleased to announce upcoming changes to our Policy Department. “We are thrilled to share the news that Lisa Cylar Barrett will be taking on the position of LDF’s Director of Policy,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, President and Director-Counsel of […]
Wednesday, June 21, 2017 | news
Generally pursued through the guise of local control, secession efforts further cement school segregation along racial and socioeconomic lines and often exacerbate inequalities between low- and high-income schools, the report found. After decades of increased integration following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, research has pointed to growth in segregation in recent […]
Thursday, April 13, 2017 | news
“What Attorney General Sessions is attempting to do is to take us back to a time to when policing was a failure, when the practices failed,” Monique Dixon, a lead attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s policing reform campaign, said in an interview. That time was in the 1980s and 1990s, when […]
Wednesday, December 7, 2016 | news
While Monique Dixon, the deputy director of policy for the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, is similarly concerned about the potential scaling back of federal investigations into police departments, she points out that the DOJ could have used the 1994 law more aggressively than it has even under President Obama. The division has only opened about […]
Tuesday, May 6, 2025 | news
May 6, 2025 – Today, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) is proud to announce its fifth cohort of the Marshall-Motley Scholars Program (MMSP). Launched in 2020, MMSP has worked to equip the South with the next generation of highly skilled civil rights lawyers dedicated to providing legal advocacy of unparalleled excellence in the pursuit of […]
Monday, October 8, 2018 | news
During his Senate confirmation hearings in 2005, Chief Justice John Roberts memorably compared himself to a baseball umpire. As a jurist, he said, his job is simply “to call balls and strikes,” not to determine the outcome of a case based on his personal preferences. In the more than decade since, the conservative justices on […]
Monday, June 26, 2017 | news
Today marks the fourth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, a devastating ruling that immobilized a part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) that was one of the most effective tools for protecting voters and strengthening our political process. As a result, far too many state and […]
Monday, October 30, 2017 | news
Fourteen years ago this week, a white sitting judge in Louisiana’s Terrebonne Parish attended a Halloween party at a public restaurant dressed as a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs, wearing an Afro wig and blackface makeup. His wife accompanied him, clad as a cop. After local NAACP leaders filed a complaint, district judge […]
Tuesday, April 2, 2019 | news
Method of Electing its City Council Violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act Today, a U.S. District Court in Alabama found that the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.’s (LDF) plaintiffs—local Black voters and the Alabama State NAACP—sufficiently alleged that the City of Pleasant Grove’s at-large method of electing its City Council violates […]
