Friday, January 22, 2021 | staff
Simeon Spencer is a Research and Operations Associate for the Thurgood Marshall Institute at LDF. Prior to joining LDF, he served in a variety of roles focused on civil rights, political rights, public housing, and criminal justice reform. At the Eric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil and Political Rights, he led programming on voter […]
Tuesday, November 13, 2018 | news
“In 1963, a 28-year-old black woman named Mary Hamilton was arrested for nonviolent protest. She was brought before an Alabama court, hardly a friendly environment for a young civil rights activist. But as she stood before the judge, she stood firm to her commitment to equal dignity: She refused to answer the prosecutor’s questions until he called […]
Wednesday, June 25, 2014 | case-update
Testimony of Sherrilyn Ifill Before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary Hearing on “The Voting Rights Amendment Act, S. 1945: Updating the Voting Rights Act in Response to Shelby County v. Holder” Watch the video here
Tuesday, March 6, 2018 | news
In her one-woman show Notes from the Field, Anna Deavere Smith exposes the consequences of America’s abandonment of our most vulnerable and troubled children. She reveals that what is now known as the “school-to-prison pipeline” is, in fact, the sum of our failures to meet the needs of our children — in particular, children of color. […]
Thursday, December 8, 2016 | news
How Democrats Must Fight the Confirmation of Jeff Sessions In a little over a month’s time confirmation hearings will begin to confirm Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, the Republican senator from Alabama, as the nation’s 84th attorney general. Last week reports surfaced that members of President-elect Donald Trump’s team are advising that this effort should focus on […]
Wednesday, April 29, 2015 | news
This is a difficult but necessary thing to say: police involved killings and assaults on unarmed African Americans are unlikely to end soon. They will not end quickly, because they are neither new nor reflective of a “moment,” and because we have not yet shown the resolve needed to end it. We must face this […]
Wednesday, June 26, 2013 | news
Sherrilyn Ifill, LDF’s President and Director-Counsel, appeared on Andrea Mitchell Reports and the PBS Newshour today to discuss the Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, which struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, leaving voters of color unprotected in places with the worst histories of racial discrimination in voting. […]
Friday, January 3, 2014 | news
In two op-eds this week for TheRoot.com and The Baltimore Sun, Sherrilyn Ifill focuses attention on real outrages — policy choices and structural inequalities that disproportionately impede the growth of black communities around the country. In “Forget Duck Dynasty; There Are Important Civil Rights Battles to Fight,” she writes that “the time we spend addressing [outrages like Paula […]
Wednesday, January 23, 2013 | news
The presence of Thurgood Marshall is almost palpable as Sherrilyn Ifill surveys the stately wood paneling, the brown leather chairs in this classroom at the University of Maryland law school. Ifill has been a law professor at the Baltimore campus for 20 years — an achievement made possible by the late Supreme Court justice’s work. […]
Friday, January 29, 2016 | news
Sherrilyn Ifill: A National Crisis Requires a National Response Sherrilyn Ifill declares that this country is facing a national crisis — a statement that she contends is not an exaggeration. The police brutality and violence projected toward the African-American community has dated back decades, but the only difference between 1915 and 2015 is the presence […]
