Wednesday, January 18, 2023 | news
Today, as in previous eras, politicized discussions of crime ignore or distort crime data to intensify public fear, heighten racial tension, and undermine criminal justice reforms that promote long-term, sustainable public safety. At times, these discussions include references to data from studies that rely on flawed methodology. In July 2022, Criminology & Public Policy published […]
Monday, December 12, 2016 | news
We Can’t Meaningfully Integrate Schools Without Desegregating Neighborhoods A bill introduced in the New York City Council proposes to establish “an office of school diversity within the human rights commission dedicated to studying the prevalence and causes of racial segregation in public schools and developing recommendations for remedying such segregation.” But it is not reasonable, […]
Monday, December 23, 2024 | news
Read a PDF of our press statement here. The Legal Defense Fund’s (LDF) Thurgood Marshall Institute (TMI) released a special edition law journal in collaboration with the Vanderbilt Social Justice Reporter (VSJR), Voting Rights in the South, on the importance of protecting and expanding voting rights across the South and beyond. As an extension of […]
Thursday, April 3, 2025 | news
Today, the Legal Defense Fund’s (LDF) Thurgood Marshall Institute (TMI) released a new report, Black Educators as Essential Workers for Educational Equity, that uses the experiences of Black public-school teachers to inform policy recommendations for promoting and advancing educational equity in elementary, middle, and high schools. The report comes at a pivotal moment of increasing […]
Thursday, January 11, 2024 | news
Today, the Legal Defense Fund’s (LDF) Thurgood Marshall Institute released a new report, Beyond Learning Loss: Prioritizing the Needs of Black Students as Public Education Emerges from a Pandemic, authored by Senior Researcher Dr. Sandhya Kajeepeta. The report examines a broad range of outcomes to describe the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black students, […]
Tuesday, April 15, 2025 | news
To commemorate the 57th anniversary of the passage of the National Fair Housing Act, the Legal Defense Fund’s (LDF) is releasing two housing justice publications. The first publication – Barred from Housing: The Discriminatory Impact of Criminal History Restrictions in Tenant Screening – highlights how public and private housing providers often use overly broad and […]
Tuesday, March 5, 2024 | news
Last week, the Legal Defense Fund’s (LDF) Thurgood Marshall Institute released a new research brief, When the State Takes Over: How State Officials Usurping Local Control Threatens Local Black Political Power, authored by Senior Researcher Dr. Sandhya Kajeepeta. The brief, released during Black History Month, outlines the history and growth of local Black political power […]
Thursday, December 15, 2016 | news
Thurgood Marshall Institute Fellow Richard Rothstein co-authored a report for the Economic Policy Institute examining the effects of parental incarceration on children’s performance in school. The report discusses the impacts the discriminatory incarceration of African American parents plays in the racial achievement gaps and why educators who are concerned about this achievement gap should make […]
Tuesday, May 24, 2016 | news
GAO Report on Segregation Misses the Bigger Picture Last week, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a misleading report on school segregation, which I discussed with NAACP Legal Defense Fund President Sherrilyn Ifill and others on the Diane Rehm Show. The takeaway line of the GAO report was: From school years 2000-01 to 2013-14, the percentage […]
Tuesday, May 10, 2016 | news
Housing Segregation Undergirds the Nation’s Racial Inequities In June, the Supreme Court rescued the Fair Housing Act from a claim that it prohibited only overt discrimination—where a government body announces that it is enacting a housing policy for racially discriminatory reasons. Instead, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion concluded that housing policies must be avoided that have […]
