Thursday, September 8, 2011 | news
LDF Presents Testimony to Congress Regarding State Laws That Threaten to Undermine Minority Voting Rights (Washington, D.C.) — Today, Ryan Haygood, Director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Political Participation Group, offered testimony at a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights that addressed a wave of laws that […]
Wednesday, August 14, 2013 | news
A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America by Evan J. Mandery highlights LDF’s role in the movement to end the death penalty. Mandery describes LDF as influential on “every major death penalty case in the United States” and “the leading voice in the abolition movement, dominating all others.” The book, which […]
Thursday, August 22, 2013 | news
Two days before the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington, in which she will be a featured speaker, Sherrilyn Ifill writes an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun “Why we still march.” Constance Baker Motley, the great civil rights lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, was not planning to attend the now-famous civil rights March on […]
Tuesday, February 26, 2013 | news
The Supreme Court almost never says why it refuses to take a case. On Monday, however, when the court denied a petition from the man convicted in Calhoun v. United States, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Stephen Breyer, issued a rare explanatory statement. One part of the trial record was so ugly that they wanted […]
Thursday, December 13, 2012 | news
At a congressional hearing billed as the first-ever focused on ending the “school-to-prison pipeline,” Edward Ward emerged as a voice of experience. Ward, a recent high school graduate from Chicago, recalled classmates suspended for failing to wear ID badges and security officers patrolling hallways. Arrests were so common that a police processing center was created […]
Friday, April 27, 2018 | news
‘Engaging in Education Equity’ to Ensure Every Student Truly Succeeds New toolkit from NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Opportunity Institute and the Dignity in Schools Campaign gives communities resources to impact their schools No Child Left Behind was widely criticized for leaving huge numbers of children behind and further marginalizing low-income communities and communities of […]
Thursday, August 1, 2013 | news
In today’s New York Times, Charles Ogletree Jr., Jesse Climenko Professor of Law at Harvard, has penned a powerful op-ed about Duane Buck and the deeply unfair and unconstitutional biases that plagued his sentencing hearing. “Nearly 50 years after the end of Jim Crow, African-Americans are still facing execution because of their race…There is no […]
Friday, September 30, 2011 | news
Nearly 40 years ago, a group of N.C. blacks met in Charlotte to take stock of where African-Americans were statewide in education, housing and jobs. Despite the 1960s civil rights victories, blacks still lived in a segregated world – many clustered in public housing. Their schools were still largely separate and ill-equipped. The rise of […]
Tuesday, November 25, 2014 | news
Out of the Ferguson crisis, US News and World Report list, “5 Things Civil Rights Groups Want From Ferguson,” a number of issues which civil rights organizations hope to focus debate as events unfold in Ferguson and reverberate throughout the country. “Activists are pointing to structures in Ferguson’s local political system that have bred […]
Tuesday, April 16, 2013 | news
Gilbert King’s riveting account of Thurgood Marshall and other LDF attorneys efforts to obtain justice for four African Americans wrongly accused of rape in 1949 Florida was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The Pulitzer Prize Board described Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, as “a richly detailed […]
