This week, Sherrilyn Ifill traveled to Ferguson, Missouri to meet with community leaders, lawyers, and professors. Although slated to talk about the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board, she adjusted the focus to a different Brown — Michael Brown. Brown’s death at the hands of local Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson ignited protests and criticism from all around the country, as well as calls for structural reforms to end racial profiling and police brutality.
“The events that have unfolded in Ferguson over the last month powerfully demonstrate the unfinished business of Brown [v. Board of Education]. In fact, the killing of Mike Brown and subsequent events all pull together the seemingly disparate strings that, taken together, reveal the tangle of ongoing white supremacy, the economic dislocation and a profound almost mind-numbing failure of political representation that stands as a warning sign that we ignore at our peril,” Sherrilyn Ifill said in a speech.
Click here to read a summary of her speech to Washington University at St. Louis’s Law School
Click here to listen to Ifill’s interview on St. Louis Public Radio.
Monique Dixon, Senior Policy Counsel for Criminal Justice and State Education Initiatives traveled to St. Louis and met with local leaders. These pictures she took show that things appeared to be business as usual — with signs announcing a farmers market, and people jogging down Florissant Road. Yet inside the library, members of the St. Louis County NAACP met to discuss the recent unrest in Ferguson
