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Hon. David H. Coar

Hon. David H. Coar served as a United States District Judge for the Northern District of Illinois for 16 years and as a United States Bankruptcy Judge for 8 years.  He served as the first United States Bankruptcy Trustee in the Northern District of Illinois from 1979 to 1982. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Coar graduated from Syracuse […]

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Holt v. Scovill

Dickson County appeared to be an idyllic, rural community of rolling farmland in north-central Tennessee. But decades of toxic dumping at a landfill poisoned the groundwater, and left three generations of a local African-American family who live next to the landfill searching for justice. In 2007 LDF, along with co-counsel, began representing 11 members of […]

Holder Is Right About Carolina Voting Law

LDF, the National Urban League and the NAACP respond to a Wall Street Journal editorial criticizing the Justice Department challenge of South Carolina’s new voter ID law. Your editorial “Holder’s Racial Politics” (Dec. 30) criticizes Attorney General Eric Holder for the Department of Justice’s decision to reject a proposed South Carolina law that would have […]

Hithon v. Tyson Foods, Inc.

John Hithon worked at a Tyson Foods plant in Gadsden, Alabama for 13 years. Despite his experience, when two supervisor jobs opened up at his plant he was passed over, remaining stuck in lower management. Instead, two white men from other plants were hired. Hithon believed his supervisor’s failure to promote him resulted from racial […]

History Lessons

The Sweatt family’s brief in the pending Supreme Court case, Fisher v. University of Texas, which the justices will hear next Wednesday, makes much of Chief Justice Vinson’s reference to “the interplay of ideas and the exchange of views.” It was, the brief maintains, “this court’s first recognition of the importance of diversity in higher […]

History Highlights: The March on Washington For Jobs and Freedom

History

The Legal Defense Fund (LDF) is the country’s first and foremost civil and human rights law firm. Founded in 1940 under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall, who subsequently became the first Black U.S. Supreme Court Justice, LDF was launched at a time when the nation’s aspirations for equality and due process of law were stifled […]

History

The Battle for the Ballot LDF has also consistently fought to eliminate barriers to full political participation by all Americans in our nation’s democratic processes.  In 1943, Thurgood Marshall successfully persuaded the Supreme Court to rule in Smith v. Allwright that Texas’s refusal to allow African-Americans to vote in the Democratic primary election violated the […]