History in the Making: Sherrilyn Ifill in Conversation With Janai Nelson
By When Thurgood Marshall founded the Legal Defense and Education Fund under the NAACP umbrella in 1940, America was embroiled in racial discrimination and early fights for civil rights. Eighty years later, the charge against our nation's inequities and injustices is Sherrilyn Ifill, who first joined the organization in 1988 as an assistant counsel in the area of voting rights.Following a 20-year hiatus from the institution in order to teach law at the University of Maryland, where she accomplished groundbreaking centered on civil rights, discrimination, and lynchings in the 21st century, Ifill returned in 2013 to take the reins as the seventh president and director-counsel of LDF. She was the second woman ever to do so, behind .