Sherrilyn A. Ifill

The program Sherrilyn Ifill helped launch on January 18, 2021, joined a law school scholarship to at least a decade of work after graduation. Developed with Janai Nelson, then associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Marshall-Motley Scholars Program would support fifty aspiring civil rights lawyers. Ifill was LDF’s president and director-counsel.

An anonymous donor committed $40 million. The funding covered tuition, room, board and incidental expenses. Students would receive summer internships and specialized training, then a two-year postgraduate fellowship with a civil rights organization practicing in the South. Scholars agreed to at least eight additional years of civil rights practice in the region. The support addressed costs that could otherwise steer graduates away from the work they had entered law school to do.

Ifill explained the geographic choice: “The majority of Black people in this country still live in the South.” She pointed to continuing barriers to voting, education equity, and racial and economic justice. She also recalled LDF’s earlier investment in Southern Black law firms, including support for Julius Chambers’s practice in North Carolina. The new program renewed that commitment to lawyers rooted in the communities they would serve.

From Selection to Practice

The program honors Thurgood Marshall, LDF’s founder and the first Black Supreme Court justice, and Constance Baker Motley, the civil rights litigator who became the first Black woman to serve as a federal judge. Its professional preparation included training offered by LDF and the National Academy of Sciences.

LDF announced the first ten scholars on May 17, 2021, the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. Hundreds had applied, and every member of the first cohort came from or had grown up in the South. Briana Hayes, from Baxley, Georgia, had already worked on rural students’ access to higher education and founded 12Tomorrow to improve Black voter turnout in Georgia’s 12th Congressional District.

By May 6, 2025, the fifth cohort had brought the program to its initial goal of fifty selected scholars. They brought experience in environmental justice, voting rights, public service, organizing and community advocacy.

A Practice Built in the South

Ifill had entered civil rights practice through a fellowship herself. After earning an English degree from Vassar College in 1984 and a law degree from New York University in 1987, she began her career at the ACLU. She joined LDF as an assistant counsel in 1988 and spent five years litigating voting rights cases in the South with senior attorneys Pamela Karlan and Lani Guinier.

In 1993, she joined the University of Maryland law faculty in Baltimore. Over twenty years, she taught Civil Procedure and Constitutional Law and developed clinical and practice courses. She co-founded a clinic challenging legal barriers faced by people returning to their communities after incarceration. Her teaching and advocacy also addressed environmental justice, voting rights, judicial diversity and impartiality, and the relationship between civil rights and the criminal legal system.

Ifill returned to LDF in 2013 as its seventh president and director-counsel and led the organization until 2022. Marshall-Motley was launched during that tenure, drawing on LDF’s longstanding work with Southern lawyers and communities.

Listening in Westminster Hall

While leading LDF, Ifill returned to the Maryland law school to co-host a Baltimore town hall with the school and Congressman Elijah Cummings. Residents packed Westminster Hall to speak with lawyers from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division about federal findings of unconstitutional policing of Black residents.

The Justice Department attorneys used what they heard in negotiations over the consent decree between the federal government, Baltimore and its police department. Ifill’s part was to help bring the residents and negotiating lawyers into the same room, where community experience could inform the terms of reform.

Research and the Legal Record

Ifill also expanded the resources supporting LDF’s litigation and policy work. Under her leadership, the organization established the Thurgood Marshall Institute as a multidisciplinary research arm, developed a grassroots organizing division and created an archives department to preserve its legal history.

Her own scholarship examined how communities continued to live with the consequences of racial violence. In her 2007 book, On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century, she addressed the continuing effects of lynching and the work of reconciliation.

The Fourteenth Amendment at Howard

Ifill now serves at Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C., as the Vernon Jordan Distinguished Professor in Civil Rights and founding director of the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy. Howard announced the center’s launch on March 27, 2025, after development that began in 2023.

Its four areas of work are law and policy; education and curriculum; art, imagination and narrative; and democratic institutions. Teaching and scholarship bring law students, advocates, community activists, business leaders, artists and other members of the public into discussions of the amendment and participation in democratic life.

Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall had helped develop a litigation strategy against legal segregation at Howard. Ifill’s teaching and the center’s public work address the same amendment’s promises of citizenship, equal protection and due process.

At the March 28 launch symposium, Ifill led discussions with historians, judges and community activists and spoke with filmmaker Ava DuVernay. She described 13TH and Selma as classroom tools and recalled her students’ responses to DuVernay’s work. “They’re all just dealing with these subjects — who we are, the constructs that hold us, the stories that are told about us.”