Friday, December 1, 2023 | news
The Legal Defense Fund (LDF) is saddened by the passing of retired Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a trailblazing jurist who became the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court. O’Connor died on December 1, 2023 at her home in Phoenix, Arizona. She was 93 years old. LDF President and Director-Counsel […]
Sunday, January 4, 2015 | news
(New York, NY)—Yesterday, the nation lost a historic figure and true champion of civil rights laws with the passing of Edward William Brooke, III, the first African American ever popularly elected to the Senate. Among his many contributions, Brooke was the author and original co-sponsor of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, passed by Congress […]
Tuesday, September 12, 2023 | news
The Legal Defense Fund (LDF) is saddened by the loss of J. Gerald ‘Gerry’ Hebert, a longtime civil rights lawyer, former Executive Director and Director at the Campaign Legal Center, and a stalwart voting rights advocate who served as co-counsel with LDF on a number of voting rights cases. “Gerry Hebert was a dogged advocate […]
Friday, March 27, 2020 | news
Rev. Darius Swann and his wife, Vera, with family and friends at Burke Presbyterian Church in Virginia. (Presbyterian Church (USA)) The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) mourns the loss of former client Reverend Darius L. Swann, lead plaintiff in the landmark school desegregation case Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. Reverend Swann […]
Monday, August 14, 2023 | news
The Legal Defense Fund (LDF) remembers former Board member Clarence Avant, a giant in the entertainment industry, who passed away on Sunday in Los Angeles, California. He was 92. Avant, who overcame immense poverty and Jim Crow laws to become a legendary entertainment producer and power broker, served as an LDF board member from 1982 […]
Friday, February 16, 2018 | case-issue
As part of our mission to defend every American’s right to vote, LDF has been closely monitoring the Administration’s Election Integrity Commission, which is tasked with investigating the president’s unfounded claims of voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election. We will continue to monitor the commission’s activities and take action where needed to prevent voter […]
Tuesday, July 2, 2013 | news
Note: Click here to review a running, and still growing, list of state, county, and local level responses to the decision, including jurisdictions’ intentions to implement new discriminatory voting changes in the wake of the decision. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) is closely monitoring how states and localities that were formerly covered by Section […]
Monday, March 9, 2015 | news
Sherrilyn Ifill Writes Op-Ed in The Bellingham Herald, Miami Herald, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch “… it is ironic that as Selma is commemorated this month, the Voting Rights Act lies critically wounded by a 2013 Supreme Court decision and that an effort to fix that damage cannot even get a hearing in Congress. Although the […]
Wednesday, July 3, 2013 | news
This week marks what would have been the 105th birthday of LDF founder Thurgood Marshall. He was LDF’s first President and Director-Counsel and led the organization through some of its most important seminal cases. Thurgood Marshall was born on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland. His father, William Marshall, the grandson of a slave, worked […]
Sunday, April 30, 2017 | news
Today marks the 31st anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Batson v. Kentucky, a landmark ruling that declared the exclusion of jurors on the basis of race to be a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Batson created a new legal standard in the United States, and it represented a significant expansion […]
