The National Equal Justice Awards Dinner (NEJAD), LDF’s signature annual fundraising event, is a gathering of 700 leaders in law, business, and philanthropy to honor those who have made a difference in the fight for racial justice and equality for all. NEJAD was held on Thursday, May 15, 2025 in New York City.
George Takei is a civil rights activist, social media superstar, Grammy-nominated recording artist, New York Times bestselling author, and pioneering actor whose career has spanned six decades.
The Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest funder of the arts, culture, and humanities, championing ideas and imagination as central forces for freedom and justice in the United States.
We owe a great debt to the demonstrators and civil rights leaders who put their lives on the line to secure the right to vote. In recognition of the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, LDF pays tribute to the everyday activists who marched in Selma and fought for voting rights for Black Americans.
Born on February 17, 1956 in Selma, Alabama, Sheyann Webb-Christburg grew up in a family of eight children and is the proud daughter of the late John and Betty Webb. She was known as the “Smallest Freedom Fighter”, and at eight years old took part in the first attempt to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, which ended when state troopers attacked those demonstrating for racial justice and voting rights. Despite being gassed and driven back with other marchers that day, Sheyann marched a second time and successfully crossed the bridge.
She is the nationally known co-author of “Selma, Lord, Selma: Girlhood Memories of the Civil Rights Days.” The movie depicts her childhood experiences with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Hosea Williams, Jonathan Daniels, Viola Liuzzo and other civil rights leaders as a young activist in the midst of the movement.
Born on October 8, 1941 in Greenville, South Carolina, Rev. Jesse Jackson graduated from public school in Greenville and then enrolled in the University of Illinois on a football scholarship. He later transferred to North Carolina A&T State University and graduated in 1964. He began his theological studies at Chicago Theological Seminary but deferred his studies when he began working full-time in the Civil Rights Movement with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was ordained on June 30, 1968 by Rev. Clay Evans and received his earned Master of Divinity degree from Chicago Theological Seminary in 2000. He is the founder and president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, and is one of America’s foremost civil rights, religious and political figures. President Bill Clinton awarded Reverend Jackson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. For his work in human and civil rights and nonviolent social change, Reverend Jackson has received more than 40 honorary doctorate degrees.
As a child in rural Tennessee, Charles “Chuck” Neblett grew up going to segregated schools. Despite the differences in resources afforded to Neblett and his Black peers, their teachers encouraged them to reach beyond the limits. In 1960, Neblett went to Cairo, Illinois to join the growing sit-in movement in that city. Jailed in Cairo five times for protest activity, he and his fellow inmates kept their spirits up with song. While in Cairo, SNCC’s Executive Secretary, James Forman, asked Neblett to come South. Neblett obliged, and helped form SNCC’s Freedom Singers in 1962. It was with the Freedom Singers that Neblett found his true voice in SNCC, and he led the group in carrying out inspirational performances that helped power the Civil Rights Movement and brought news of the struggles of the south to the rest of the country. He remains a civil rights activist and icon today.
Rev. Leodis Strong is Pastor for the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma, Alabama, a sacred site in the fight for voting rights and an iconic institution of the Civil Rights Movement in its own right. Brown Chapel was where marchers gathered ahead of that fateful Bloody Sunday on March 7, 1965, to begin their trek from Selma to Montgomery to call for the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Rev. Strong previously served as a Supervisory Clinical Chaplain with the Veterans Health Administration and as a school board member and president before arriving in Selma to serve as Brown Chapel’s pastor.
Linda Brown was born on February 20, 1943, in Topeka, Kansas, to Leola and Oliver Brown. In 1950, the NAACP asked a group of Black parents that included Oliver Brown to attempt to enroll their children in all-white schools, with the expectation that they would be turned away. The strategy was for the civil rights group to file a lawsuit on behalf of 13 families, who represented different states. The case would come to be known as Brown v. Board of Education.
In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, though by that time Brown was in junior high, a grade level that had been integrated before the 1954 court ruling. She went on to attend Washburn University and Kansas State University, and in 1979 reopened her suit against the Topeka school district with the ACLU, arguing its schools were still racially segregated. Brown won on appeal, with a federal judge ordering a desegregation plan for the Topeka school district. She died in 2018 at 76.
James Howard Meredith was born on June 25, 1933, in Kosciusko, MS. He served in the U.S. Air Force until 1960. His repeated applications to the University of Mississippi were denied on the basis of his race, and he ultimately filed suit with the assistance of the NAACP. Though the Supreme Court ruled on his behalf in Meredith v. Fair (1962), Meredith’s battle for admission was not over. Violent mobs rioted on campus and attacked federal marshals who were there for Meredith’s protection.
Despite this, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in August 1963 and went on to earn his LL.B. in 1968 from Columbia Law School. In 1966 he led a solitary “March Against Fear” from Memphis to Jackson in protest of the physical violence that African-Americans faced while exercising their right to vote. Meredith was shot on the second day of the march and civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., stepped in to complete it. Meredith continues to be a voice and icon for civil rights.
Muhammad Ali, was born Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr. on January 17, 1942 and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. He began boxing as a child, won a gold medal at the 1960 Rome Summer Olympics, and beat the world heavyweight champion in 1964. He later announced that he had accepted the teachings of the Nation of Islam and took the name Muhammad Ali. Citing his religious beliefs, he refused induction into the U.S. Army during the war in Vietnam and was stripped of his championship and precluded from fighting by every state athletic commission in the United States.
In addition, he was convicted of refusing induction into the U.S. armed forces and sentenced to five years in prison. Although he remained free on bail, four years passed before his conviction was unanimously overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. In the 1960s, Ali emerged as a voice for civil rights due to his message of Black pride and resistance. In later years, Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and died in 2016 at 74.
Growing up as an only child in Richmond, Virginia, Kemba Smith graduated high school and continued her education at the prestigious Hampton University. Although Smith never sold or used drugs, federal prosecutors charged her with conspiracy to distribute cocaine, due to the actions of her then boyfriend. This led to Smith to be sentenced to 24 and a half years in federal prison. LDF became involved with Kemba’s case in 1996 after learning of the injustices she suffered. In December 2000, President Bill Clinton commuted Smith’s sentence to time served.
She wrote about her real life experience in the book, “Poster Child: The Kemba Smith Story.” She has spoken at the White House, testified before Congress and the United Nations regarding a variety of criminal justice issues including: crack cocaine sentencing, mandatory drug sentencing, women and incarceration, felony disenfranchisement, and re-entry.
Born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama, Evan Milligan attended Birmingham-Southern College where he graduated in 2003 as a religion major. He earned his JD at New York University School of Law. He currently serves as co-director of the Western State Center’s Common Good program, helping civic leaders in the United States understand the relationship between antisemitism, other forms of ethnic bigotry, and authoritarianism.
Milligan served as the founding executive director of Alabama Forward, a statewide civic engagement table advancing efforts of nonpartisan organizations throughout Alabama to expand the voter base, protect voting rights, and make election systems as accessible as possible. He is also the named plaintiff in Allen v. Milligan, a federal lawsuit filed by the Legal Defense Fund under Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In June 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Milligan and his co-plaintiffs, leading to the creation of a second Congressional district providing Black Alabamians an opportunity to elect a candidate of choice.
Alice Washington graduated from Southern University, a historically Black university in Baton Rouge, with a degree in psychology in 1969 and pursued graduate studies in clinical social work at the University of Oklahoma. She later completed her master’s degree and doctorate in social work at Howard University. Washington retired in 2015 and returned to her home state of Louisiana. In 2022, after the Louisiana legislature enacted maps that packed Black voters, one-third of the state’s population, into only one majority-Black district out of six total, Washington joined eight other individual voters and two organizations as plaintiffs in an LDF lawsuit that argued the state had violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
On January 19, 2024 the Louisiana Legislature passed a map that creates a second majority-Black congressional district after being granted a final opportunity to pass a map before a federal court trial. The map came as a direct result of years of litigation in Robinson v. Landry.
In 2020, LDF – along with co-counsel Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP – began representing De’Andre Arnold, his mother Sandy Arnold, and his cousin Kaden Bradford in their hair discrimination lawsuit against the Barbers Hill Independent School District (“BHISD”) in Mont Belvieu, Texas. In December 2019, De’Andre and Kaden – who had been growing uncut locs for years in homage to their Black and Trinidadian heritage – were assigned to in-school suspension and excluded from extracurricular activities and graduation due to BHISD’s revised grooming policy.
De’Andre later graduated from another high school, but LDF secured a preliminary injunction in 2020, barring the school district from enforcing its hair policy against Kaden. The case and De’Andre’s advocacy helped spur on the passage of the CROWN Act in Texas in 2023, a law prohibiting race-based hair discrimination in housing, workplaces, and schools.
Born in Chicago, Illinois, Diane Nash is best known as the co-founder of the SNCC. Nash began her journey into civil rights at Fisk University, attending non-violence workshops in 1960 hosted by the Rev. James Lawson. In 1961, she left Fisk and began organizing the Freedom Rides. That same year, she got married and joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). That same year, while four months pregnant, she faced a 10-year prison sentence for the delinquency of minors for her role in the Freedom Rides. She was eventually sentenced to 10 days in a Jackson, Mississippi jail. In 1963, following the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four young girls, she immediately began to conceptualize the Selma march. In 1965, she was awarded SCLC’s Rosa Parks Award for her work developing the Selma campaign. She remains fiercely committed to the practice of nonviolent movements and is one of the most important civil rights organizers and advocates in living memory.
Marian Wright Edelman is founder and president emirata of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF). Mrs. Edelman, a graduate of Spelman College and Yale Law School, began her career in the mid-60s when she directed the then-NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund office in Jackson, Mississippi. In 1968, she moved to Washington, D.C., as counsel for the Poor People’s Campaign that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. began organizing before his death. She founded the Washington Research Project, a public interest law firm and the parent body of the Children’s Defense Fund. For two years she served as the Director of the Center for Law and Education at Harvard University and in 1973 founded the CDF. In 2000, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.
Thurgood Marshall was born on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland. He attended the all-black Lincoln University and, after being rejected from the University of Maryland School of Law because of his race, went on to attend law school at Howard University and graduated first in his class. In 1936, Marshall became the NAACP’s chief legal counsel, where he worked to litigate cases that would address the heart of segregation. After founding the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in 1940, Marshall became the key strategist in the effort to end racial segregation, in particular challenging Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court-sanctioned legal doctrine that called for “separate but equal” structures for white and Black people. Marshall won a series of court decisions that gradually struck down that doctrine, ultimately leading to Brown v. Board of Education, which he argued before the Supreme Court in 1952 and 1953. In 1967, he became the first Black U.S. Supreme Court Justice. He died in 1993.
Constance Baker Motley was born on September 14, 1921, in New Haven, Connecticut. Her mother was a community activist and founded the New Haven NAACP. Motley graduated from New York University in 1943 and attended Columbia Law School. She began her career at LDF in 1945 as a law clerk and was promoted to assistant special counsel in 1949. LDF’s second female (and first Black female) attorney, Motley rose to prominence as the chief courtroom strategist of the Civil Rights Movement. Motley was a key architect in the fight for desegregation in the South. From 1945 to 1964, Motley worked on all of the major school desegregation cases brought by LDF. She led the litigation of the case that integrated the University of Georgia and directed the legal campaign that resulted in the admission of James H. Meredith to the University of Mississippi in 1962, paving the way for the integration of universities across the south.
Born on December 22, 1924, Jack Greenberg grew up in Brooklyn and the Bronx. After graduating from Columbia Law School in 1949, he was hired by LDF Founder and later Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. At 27, Greenberg became the youngest member of the team of lawyers that argued the Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court. He argued 40 cases before the high court, including Furman v. Georgia, in which the Supreme Court held that the death penalty violated the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause of the Eighth Amendment. In 1961, Greenberg became LDF’s Director-Counsel, and later represented Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Greenberg retired from LDF in 1984. In 2001, he was awarded a Presidential Citizens Medal. Greenberg wrote Crusaders in the Courts: How a Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution (1994). He died in 2016.
