06-11-2023 HOF - Flipbook - Page 45

Baltimore Sun Media | Sunday, June 11, 2023
S
herrilyn Iﬁll has known she wanted to be a civil
rights lawyer since she was a child.
The former president and director-counsel of
the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
(LDF) was not the daughter of attorneys or from
a family of legal minds. She quickly dispels that
notion.
“The ﬁrst lawyer I met was my ﬁrst day of law
school,” she says with a laugh. Despite that, she
knew the law was her calling: “There was no other
path for me.”
Today Iﬁll is considered one of the most provocative, tenacious and
authoritative scholars of civil rights law in the country. And she has called
Baltimore home for 30 years.
Born in New York, Iﬁll remembers learning about the Civil Rights Movement from TV programs.
“My father was very kind of politically oriented. So we watched a lot of
documentaries,” Iﬁll recalls. “Seeing Barbara Jordan [the Texas lawyer
and politician] was a revelation for me. … She was this incredibly powerful
Black woman who spoke with authority and a sense of ownership about
the Constitution.”
Iﬁll says she knew that her vision of being a lawyer would include working on behalf of those who were marginalized in America, particularly
Black people and other communities of color.
“The law is a powerful tool,” Iﬁll says. “It’s not the only tool, but it is a
powerful tool for vindicating the rights of people whose voices have been
silenced.”
After earning her law degree, Iﬁll worked for ﬁve years as an attorney for
the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Age: 60
Hometown: New York City (Queens)
Current residence: Baltimore
Education: B.A., Vassar College; J.D.,
New York University School of Law
Professional experience or career history: Fellow, American
Civil Liberties Union; assistant counsel, NAACP Legal Defense
and Educational Fund; professor, University of Maryland Francis
King Carey School of Law; author,“On the Courthouse Lawn:
Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century”; president
and director-counsel, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
(2013-2022); currently senior fellow, Ford Foundation
Civic/charitable activities: Named one of Time magazine’s
100 Most Influential People in the World (2021);
recipient, Brandeis Medal, Radcliffe Medal, Thurgood
Marshall Award from the American Bar Association (2022),
Attorney of the Year from The American Lawyer magazine (2020);
board member: Baltimore Museum of Art, Mellon Foundation,
New York University School of Law
Family: Married with three children
She moved to Baltimore to take a
teaching position at the University
of Maryland Francis King Carey
School of Law in 1993.
That job interview was the ﬁrst
time she visited Baltimore.
“I wanted to be in a very diverse
town,” Iﬁll says, adding that she also
wanted to be in a town that cared
about food and had good places to
eat. “Baltimore was that and I liked
the vibe.”
For 20 years, Iﬁll taught students
civil procedure and constitutional
law. She introduced clinical law
programs focused on environmental justice, the rights of formerly
incarcerated people and reparations. At the same time, she and
her husband raised their young
children in Baltimore, laying down
roots near Edmondson Village.
They were active in church and
community, enjoying family time at
Shake & Bake Family Center, going
to Stone Soul Picnic and visiting
Artscape.
“I call Baltimore my adopted
home,” she says. “You live somewhere and you embrace that place.”
Ifill was embraced by her
colleagues at the Carey School
of Law and by her students, who
treated her with “absolute reverence,” says Renée McDonald
Hutchins, who is now dean of the
law school, but worked as a professor alongside Ifill for almost a
decade.
“She has this amazing ability to,
without question, be the smartest
person in the room, but never make
anybody else feel dumb,” Hutchins
says.
Some lessons learned from Iﬁll
were more personal than professional for Hutchins. Both were
managing the dual pressures of
being moms to young children and
working as tenure-track professors.
Hutchins says Iﬁll was helpful
in reminding her to take care of
herself, too. She told Hutchins to
“ﬁnd a way to carve out space to ﬁll
your own cup back up.”
Iﬁll is perhaps best known by
the public as president of the Legal
Defense Fund, a position that lured
her away from teaching in 2013.
LDF was founded in 1940 by Baltimore native and future Supreme
Court Justice Thurgood Marshall
to uphold civil rights and advocate
for racial equality.
Iﬁll spent nearly 10 years leading LDF during a time of pervasive
challenges. Although the organization is headquartered in New York,
she expanded its office in Washington D.C., giving LDF a foothold in the nation’s capital, where
issues such as voting rights, police
brutality and racial discrimination
were being politicized in a volatile
manner.
“The Trump years were very,
very turbulent and stretched us
in ways that we had never been
stretched before,” Iﬁll says, noting
the numerous lawsuits filed by
LDF against the administration on
a variety of policies.
“I’m very proud of the courage
we showed,” she says.
Iﬁll kept her staff in mind as she
made plans to exit LDF in 2022,
strengthening ﬁnancials “beyond
our wildest dreams” and setting up
a smooth transition for her successor.
“It was hard,” Iﬁll says about her
decision to leave. “Leading LDF
was my dream job. It almost felt like
I was perfectly made for it.”
While no longer in charge of
day-to-day skirmishes, Iﬁll has not
left the battleﬁeld. She continues
to speak publicly on behalf of civil
rights and racial justice.
“To be in a war for justice and a
war for equality, doesn’t mean that
you’re at the front all the time,” Iﬁll
says. “Sometimes you have to have
shore leave … and then come back
out ﬁghting and that’s kind of what
I’m doing.”
She is writing her second book,
which is to be titled “Is This America?” The name is a play on the
question posed by Fannie Lou
Hamer in a speech at the 1964
Democratic National Convention. Hamer, a Black activist from
Mississippi, was brutally beaten for
trying to register to vote.
As a student of history, that
moment was memorable for
Iﬁll. Her book, while not directly
answering Hamer’s question, will
offer a vision for moving the country forward, Iﬁll says.
“When I was a kid, I dreamed of
being part of the Civil Rights Movement, and I was part of it,” Iﬁll says.
“And I am part of it because there
isn’t just one movement.”
— Michelle Deal-Zimmerman
45

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