Sherrilyn Ifill
LDF 7th President & Director-Counsel
Sherrilyn Ifill served as the seventh President and Director-Counsel of LDF from 2013 to 2022. Ifill, the second woman to ever lead LDF, provided visionary and transformational leadership during one of the most consequential and intense moments in our nation’s history. In 2013, Ifill was invited back to the Legal Defense Fund – this time to lead the organization as its 7th Director-Counsel. In that role, Ifill increased the visibility and engagement of the organization in litigating cutting-edge and urgent civil rights issues and elevating the organization’s decades-long leadership fighting voter suppression, inequity in education, and racial discrimination in the criminal legal system.
Transcript
I mean, I think these are going to be the iconic images of this civil rights period. But there is no choice but to go forward. We will go forward. I think for some people, that's very frightening. For those of us who are focused on opening up doors of equality and opportunity. It's a wonderful and exciting period, even with all its challenges.
Transcript
Civil rights work has its ebbs and flows. The period that we all tend to recognize as the Civil Rights Movement was a particular period in time in which, because of a variety of seismic shifts in American society, an issue that had been percolating and long standing and unaddressed suddenly was before America and could no longer be denied. When Thurgood Marshall retired from the United States Supreme Court, he was interviewed and asked what was his most important case. Most people would think that Thurgood Marshall would say Brown v. Board of Education, but in fact, he said it was Smith v. Allwright, which was a case he won in 1944 in the United States Supreme Court, successfully challenging the all white Democratic primary in Texas. Because he thought that political participation, opening the door for African Americans to exercise what is in this country, the most important expression of citizenship was so critically important.
Transcript
Most people don't recognize the silent force of protection that the Voting Rights Act provided. The Voting Rights Act has ensured that some of the most discriminatory laws in this country never came to pass. The Shelby County decision meant that now jurisdictions all over the country could make whatever voting changes they wanted to. These problems have not been consigned to history. They continue to exist. Their effects are real. They are of today, not yesterday. And they corrode the foundations of our democracy. In one county in Georgia, the jurisdiction proposed to close all but two of their 24 polling places and to move those two into the police station. In another jurisdiction, they decided to close three of the four polling places in the African American community, requiring voters to travel 25 miles to cast a ballot. Texas, for example, has one of the most stringent photo identification laws in the country, and every federal court to have examined that law has held that it discriminates against Black and Latino Texans. In Texas, the voter ID law requires voters to present a valid picture ID before casting ballots in state and local elections. The Texas law was passed in 2011 but was put on hold after a court found it discriminated against minorities. There was redistricting happening in the transformation of town councils and school boards that were removing seats just as African Americans had been able to elect a candidate of their choice. Groups are suing over a law that took effect this year in North Carolina, requiring photo ID to vote in person, eliminating same day registration and reducing the number of early voting days. Those groups appealed an April ruling that went against their case. Many of you may have seen in the primary election this year in Arizona the long lines that people were in for six and seven hours, all because the state had decided to close 70 polling places. Nothing stopped them from doing it. And we saw it in Wisconsin, and we saw it in Alabama, and we saw it in South Carolina. And so all of these changes began to happen right after the Shelby County decision. I think many people don't recognize that this is the first presidential election in 50 years without the full provisions of the Voting Rights Act. We haven't seen a landscape like this in half a century.
Transcript
The Question is, what do you do with this moment? What do you do in a moment when people are paying attention, when many people want to be part of a solution, when young people are activated and engaged and in some instances, rightfully angry, the power of now is that this moment, while it feels, I think, for many Americans, very uncomfortable, even scary for some, is actually a moment of tremendous opportunity. The Power of Now speaks to the moment that we're in. It is a call to action. It's a subpoena, if you will, that commands that all of us show up to respond to the promise of this moment and leverage what is a new and in many ways more challenging dialogue about race in this country.
