Sherrilyn Ifill is a civil rights lawyer and scholar. From 2013 to 2022, she served as the President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), the nation’s premier civil rights law organization fighting for racial justice and equality. She recently served as a Ford Foundation Fellow, and as the Klinsky Visiting Professor for Leadership & Progress at Howard Law School. Ifill is currently the Vernon Jordan Distinguished Professor in Civil Rights at Howard Law School, where later this year she will launch the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy. She also holds a fellowship at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Ifill, a graduate of Vassar College (’84) who earned her J.D. from New York University School of Law, is a scholar whose work has appeared in leading law journals, periodicals, and national newspapers. Her book On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century was highly acclaimed, and is credited with laying the foundation for contemporary conversations about lynching and reconciliation. She is currently completing a new book about race and the current crisis in American democracy, entitled Is This America?, which will be published by Penguin Press.

This endowed lecture, the Norman Hodges Lecture, is sponsored by Africana Studies, the Dean of the Faculty Office, the President’s Office, Political Science, Sociology, and American Studies.

This event is open to the public.