Sherrilyn Ifill in Conversation With Janai Nelson About the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Transition of Power – Glamour

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 led by president and director-counsel 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 work 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 Elaine Jones. Since then, she has evolved the institution into one of powerful influence on policy and legislation.

On Monday, March 14, Ifill will pass the mantle to her longtime deputy and current associate director-counsel, Janai Nelson. It will be a historic event: the first woman-to-woman succession in the firm’s storied 81-year history. “It’s a very exciting moment,” Ifill says of the transition. “It’s bittersweet, because I so love LDF. It has been the absolute honor and privilege of a lifetime to lead this organization for 10 years.”

A Glamour and Time Woman of the Year honoree, Ifill leaves an important legacy behind. During her time at the helm, she became an influential voice on racial discrimination and voting rights. Under her leadership, the LDF has been behind landmark work that’s changed the lives of those living on the margins, at times joining forces with coalitions like the CROWN Act, an initiative fighting to make hair discrimination illegal. She’s also led the institution in efforts to resist rollbacks of civil rights efforts like affirmative action and combated voter suppression and inequities in the criminal justice system. Most recently, Ifill has pushed President Biden and Congress to nominate progressive judicial nominees that would balance the bench former President Trump and his Republican-led Senate had filled with conservatives. (Before Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination this year, Ifill was said to be on the short list to fill retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s seat.)

Nelson, LDF’s second in command, has been working right alongside Ifill for eight years as she’s led research on education equity and the legal strategy for the 2020 National Urban League v. Trump case, which declared the former president’s ban on inclusion training in the workplace unconstitutional. (The ban was later overruled when Biden took office.) 

For Nelson, it’s been the “privilege of a lifetime” working at LDF with Ifill. “I look forward to continuing building on the legacy of the seven prior presidents and director-counsels who laid a foundation and had a vision for this organization,” she says. “It has allowed LDF to evolve into something that is now integral to the fabric of our democracy.”