Sherrilyn Ifill on Today’s Civil Rights Movement

not right for this job. That's Sherylyn Eiffel. I'm the President and Director Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund until midnight tonight. Then I will be stepping down. I caught up with Eiffel on the last day of her nearly decade long tenure leading the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The LDF has handled many of the biggest civil rights cases in the country, such as Brown versus the Board

of Education. We also were the lawyers who represented Martin Luther King in Birmingham, and we represented the Selma Marchers, and we represented the Freedom Writers, and you know, we represented Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Improvement Association, and we represented Muhammad Ali and getting his boxing license back. So you know, all the things you think of the lawyers by and large were LDF. When if All started out at LDF, she was daunted by the work ahead of her.

I joined LDF at nineteen eighty eight, and you must remember, Anita, that I was a young lawyer at LDF. So when you start in that position, you are gazing up at the founders and the leaders of the organization with all in reverence. And I've never lost that. Leading today's American civil rights movement is a massive job. Eiffel personally reviews every brief that has filed to the federal and Supreme courts.

She also writes her own op eds and manages everything from fundraising to operations, and like each of Eiffel's predecessors, she has left her mark. I felt very strongly that in order to be relevant in civil rights work, you can't just do your cases, you know, your litigation. You have to be able to respond to what is moving people's heart and soul in the moment. One of Eiffel's legacies at the Legal Defense Fund is her creation of a rapid response team. Through it, she has helped shape

the larger narrative about race in this country. And I have been quite determined to do that I'm Anita Hill. This is Getting Even, my podcast about equality and what it takes to get there. On Getting Even, I speak with people who are improving our imperfect world, people who took risks and broke the rules. In this episode, CHERYLN. Eifel reflects on her work at the NAACP Legal Defense

Fund and how it fits into our world today. What are some of the cases and the initiatives that are at the front of your mind on your last day and with LDF, Well, I think this so called anti critical race theory movement, which is really an anti truth movement. This whole effort to memory hold the truth about the history of racism, to remove this from our educational system, to try and change our perception of history, to try to bury history, is something that we could not have

anticipated three years ago, five years ago. But here it is, and it's real and it's dangerous. We're already in a number of states participating with local grassroots groups testifying ourselves in opposition to some of these bills. There will be litigation in some of these places. LDF has worked forever on issues of police violence against on armed African Americans, and obviously voting rights are key, But you know, LDF has a whole docket of cases around natural hair discrimination,

which people that somehow can't believe, but it's true. You know, a lot of our hair discrimination cases, for example, really began with young people and litigating those cases of young people who were suspended or who were told they couldn't

walk in graduation because they had lots. You know, we released a report written by one of our terrific young attorneys a few years ago that just focused on the way in which discipline is meted out to black girls in public schools in Baltimore City, and it was very important to us to explore this issue of how black girls bodies are used to suggest that they violate dress codes, the way in which black girls are kind of not allowed to be girls, the way in which the license

that's taken to search black girls again is a denial of their dignity and their privacy, the presumptions that are made about black girls and their sophistication. A lot of our approach to our work is getting in there and understanding the way in which certain kinds of infractions particularly are experienced. Is just really important to put together a more complex picture of what the denial of civil rights

looks like for different members of our community. That's really exciting work that I think maybe people don't necessarily even know is going on. I agree, you're doing so much. Maybe you can't know every thing. You know, it's so true. I mean, if you're familiar with the Los Angeles bus system, that was an LDF case that we sue to make sure that the bus routes in Los Angeles would reach

black and brown communities in the city. And so I'm sure people get on the buses every day and they don't think, oh, this is the result of a civil rights suit by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. But it is the work that we've done in the employment discrimination area. You know. I talk about a case we won in nineteen seventy one called Phillips versus Martin Marietta, an LDF case brought on behalf of a white woman who was challenging the rule at Martin Marietta that they did not

hire women who had preschool aged children. That was just the rule of the firm, you know. LDF we argued that case in the Supreme Court in one So you know, I say all the time to women in corporate America. You know, if you've got your job and you have young children, that was LDF. You have us to think, right, yeah, exactly, exactly. There was no blueprint fifty years ago, certainly not when

d was established. I think civil rights work today is very different in terms of the amount of partners that you have that are collaborating with you. All of the civil rights community can't be represented in one organization, that's right. Tell me about your collaboration if you will, with the Leadership Conference of Civil Rights. Oh yeah, it's an ecosystem that has to be strong, and the Leadership Conference is essential to the ecosystem because it brings us all together

and it's really important. I say this all the time. LDF is largely a litigating organization and a policy organization, but we also have organizers on our staff. But you know, we're not a membership organization. You know, people need people to turn out at a march. That's going to be the National Action networker people who have members or affiliates. That's not us. But every part of the ecosystem has

a role to play. One of the things we were so clear about when Trump was elected, we actually had meetings about it was that we were all going to stand shoulder to shoulder because we genuinely believed. I think maybe we underestimated the brutality of Trump's tactics, but we believe that we're going to try to drive wedges between the black and Latino community around issues like immigration or

the black and LGBTQ community. And so one of the things we were very explicitly clear about was that there would be no daylight between us on any of the issues that we worked on, and that proved to be an incredible strength, and we all understood we had to

show up for one another quickly. When Tree of Life happened, as soon as I heard it, my text went out to Jonathan Greenblat the relationship between John Yang and I, the head of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and our very explicit modeling of ally ship between the black and Asian American community over the last year and a half as hate crimes have risen exponentially against the Asian American community.

All of that is intentional because we understand that our work and our survival is dependent on our to stand strong and to stand shoulder to shoulder in the work. I know you mentioned a number of women who are now heading these organizations, which historically wasn't the case. Do you think that that sort of intersectional influence that is coming in with the diverse leadership will change the work of LDF in the future or will inform the work

of LDF in the future. You know, I think every Director Council brings their secret sauce to the table, whatever that might be, that is very much a product of their experience, and I borrowed from every Director council. Nineteen eighty eight, I was hired by Julius Chambers, one of the most extraordinary, consequential and courageous civil rights lawyers as country has ever known, and who most people don't know. He litigated the Swan versus Mechleberg case, Landmark school disegregation

case in one eighteen month period. He had his car, his office, and his house fire, and Julius always just kept it moving. Elaine Jones really built our profile in DC right and on Capitol Hill. My communication efforts and understanding the importance of being a voice and a face in shaping the narrative was very much taken from Thirgood. He had a way about him that made people want

to listen to him that was accessible. They could understand the average person could understand what he was talking about when he was talking about the cases that he was litigating. That was important to me to be able to convey that. Jack Greenberg was incredibly entrepreneurial and expanded the organization in all kinds of ways. He would say, let's file five hundred cases that would challenge, you know, discrimination in various

textile plants across the South. I mean, he was just extremely entrepreneurial and moved LDF in a lot of different directions that still exist today. So everybody has their secret sauce they bring to the table. I came to this space from spending many years having left New York and moving to Baltimore and having a real strong sense of what I thought was important about the experience of black people in what I kind of call second tier cities, you know, not New York or San Francisco or Chicago,

but Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit. I got really interested in that, and a lot of the work on our docket reflects that. I'm a big believer in rapid response, and so I built a rapid response capacity in the organization because I felt very strongly that in order to be relevant in civil rights work, you know, you can't just do your cases, you know, your litigation, you have to be able to respond to what is moving people's heart and soul in

the moment. If Mike Brown is lying on that street as he was that Saturday, when I saw on Twitter this kind of growing concern about this young man who had been shot by an officer and that his body was still in the street, I started tracking that and by Sunday night I had assembled my team on the phone to say, something's happening, you know, and we need to understand what it is. And the first thing we did was send one of our organizers down because we

understood this wasn't a matter of litigation per se. There was something else that was happening around this issue of police violence. So that very much comes out of my own experience and thinking about how to approach these issues and how the community expects people who hold themselves in the position of being civil rights leaders to be responsive to the things that they care about. After the break, Eiffel and I talk about what lies ahead, where progress

stalls and where we can place our hope. You're listening to getting even I'm Anita Hill. I'm speaking with Sherylyn Eiffel, President and Director Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Eifel and I spoke on her last day on the job. We look toward the future civil rights and what type of leadership we need. I want to talk about leadership in Washington, DC and it specifically. I want to start with the courts. We now have a nominee, Judge Jackson for the Supreme Court. Tell me how you think that

will play out in the next few weeks. Well, I think she'll be confirmed. I don't have any doubt about that. But I do think that there will be some bad behavior by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. And it doesn't matter who the person is. Cason point is Katangi Brown Jackson, who by all measures has a very moderate record. This is not a civil rights lawyer, as a moderate record, has more judicial experience heading into the Supreme Court than

Chief Justice Roberts did heading into the Supreme Court. And yet you know already you heard Senator Lindsay Graham saying her nomination is part of a leftist agenda, you know, so you know that it's going to there's going to be some bad behavior. It won't change the outcome. But I don't take it lightly because people have to want to serve, and it's not pleasant for people to go

through that kind of gauntlet to serve. And it's a way of showing a certain license that they believe they have and that they believe they should take, particularly with women of color. And my own belief is that that trickles down into the workplace of the average woman, that people watch that and think they can call any woman in a professional setting out of her name, or call them an Affirmative action nominee, or deem them unqualified by virtue of their race, and so on and so forth.

So so I think it's harmful and toxic and dangerous, but unfortunately, I think we will see some of that. Can she make a difference on this chord? I mean, I think to the average person, first of all, the trust in the Supreme Court has declined over the years, and now I think it's about forty percent favorability rating of the Supreme Court itself. You know, we've got a

majority of the justices squarely conservative. And how are we to see the potential for her terms on the Supreme Court, every justice can make a difference that they choose to do so. So, first of all, it's a choice. You have to decide that you want to make a difference, and you're absolutely right. I can do math as well as the next guy. It is a six three court

at this point. And so the idea is that the Conservatives have a strong majority of a stronghold, and they have shown themselves, particularly over the last year or so, to be quite willing to flex their muscles and to be even reckless in my view, with the flexing of those muscles. But it can change if you think about justice. So to Mayor, and particularly over the last two years, the kinds of dissents that she's been writing, and as I said in a recent op ed that I wrote

in the New York Times, they sting. You can tell that they sting, and they are meant to sting because you can't make it easy for them to dismantle the infrastructure of civil rights. You can't make it easy for them. And then the second piece that she's doing is that she's talking to the public. She's showing us that what we think is happening is in fact happening. You know,

You're absolutely right. And one of the things that I know for sure and now is that the public is listening to what is happening on the Supreme Court in a different way than they have been in past. Yes, they are paying attention. I think that they will see that the effort that the conservatives are taking is really systematic and it is increasingly emboldened to actually rewrite the law. At the same time claim that they're not an activist chord. And so I do believe that these this sense will

be powerful. Yes, And they're not going to be just speaking to each other now that they're going to be talking to the public, to the other courts and to the legislative bodies. And so these are really important times for us to think about what is in fact the judicial imagination that we had for equalities. There was I think a roar of approval when at some point, you know, Justice Sotomayoran in one case cited Tanahasi Coats and you'd be like, who you cite? Who you suggest is worth

listening to? Right, It's a kind of scholarship that the Court should engage. There are all kinds of ways as a Supreme Court justice that you can be influential if you choose to do so. So it is in the hands of Judge Jackson to decide how she will be on the court. She will have an opportunity. Of course, she's going to do what most of us would do, I'm sure, which is make friends and alliances where she can.

That's an important part of the job. I have no doubt she will do that, and then I suspect she'll be quite scared full at it. But there are all kinds of ways to be influential, and I think that giving her a little bit of time, she will find her way. Do you think it's helpful that she's a former public defender? Absolutely? I mean I have railed for some time against what I believe has been the capture of the federal courts in general and the Supreme Court

more specifically by prosecutors. That was the pathway to becoming a federal judge, and increasingly the pathway to serving on the Supreme Court as well. People had worked in the Justice Department, They've been US attorneys and so forth, and I think it shows in the jurisprudence that comes from the federal courts that the mindset is more prosecutor oriented.

And it's fascinating because most of the things that we take pride in when we go to conferences in other countries about our legal system, our constitutional system, our criminal justice system, are all the things that are really on the defense side. We're proud of in until proven guilty and Miranda warnings and yeah, and due process and the ability to confront your accuser and the right to remain

silent and for that not to be incriminating. And just think about all of the things that we talk about as making a criminal legal system sound in a democracy, and they're not about how many people we put away in for how many years and how many people we

have on death row. Those are not the things that American lawyers brag about around the world, right, So it's fascinating that the role of public defenders and criminal defense attorneys in general, along with civil rights lawyers who are doing some of the noblest work in this profession, has largely been downgraded among the qualifications for those who serve on the Supreme Court and on the federal courts in general.

And I think we've been really pushing to reverse that, and I credit President Biden with having done an exemplary job of beginning to turn that around in his federal nominations as well as with the domination of Judge Jackson. You had mentioned Mike Brown in the response of LDF to the situation involving his death. We have just come off a couple of years of the pandemic where we

have focused on inequities. We have a Black Lives Matter movement, and the movement has gotten a lot of traction lately, and the public seems to be paying attention to these issues. Nevertheless, it does not seem that leadership in Washington has really taken up the mantle and moved to do more policy work to support these ideas and these early cries for justice. How can we make the connection, How can these movements become the influencers of policy in this country. Well, I

think we have a political problem. We have a broken political system that has to be overhauled in a variety of ways. I don't put that at the feet of the civil rights community, because I think one of the things that's been revealed by the Trump presidency and the excesses of his presidency and of Congress during those years, are the ways in which the system has to be fixed. I think the conversation we've had for the last year

about the filibuster rule is enormously important. That we have a right to weigh in on procedures and practices that are archaic that stand in the way of moving our democracy forward, and that has to be addressed. So we have a problem. We have a problem in which some of the rules need to be changed, but we also have a problem in which political leaders are valuing power over democracy, and that is the beginning authoritarianism, and it's very,

very serious. People want to stay in their jobs. I mean, if you think about jerrymandering, another thing that is anti democratic at the levels that we're seeing it, and yet people are willing to do it so that their party can stay in power forever. I mean, this is every child knows that sometimes I go first and sometimes you go first. When we play a game, right, it's your turn and then it's my turn. We're now facing a moment where even that seminal lesson that every child knows

has been lost. This is part of why Trump can't say he lost the election, because it's never anybody else's turn. It's only his turn. And that's what's happening to our politics. And I keep saying that the movements really have done their job. Yes, the movements have done their job. Oh listen, let me let me say this. Let me just get this out. We did the dog on saying okay, we

did it. The work that we've done, the movements, the ordinary people who have been fighting, the millions of people who came out in fifty States after seeing the video of George Floyd being killed in the middle of a global pandemic, fifty states largest civil rights marches we have ever seen in this country and around the world in solidarity. The people have been on point, and the civil rights

ecosystem has been on point. The politics is broken and is working counter to what the people are showing us they want. And it is also true that there are people who are opposed to us. They've been coming out there at the school board meetings, right There's fewer in number, but they are willing to be cruel, rude, brutal, sometimes violent. And you saw what happened on January sixth, just a few thousand people, but look at what they did, and

we look at what they were prepared to do. And we're also in this situation right now where we have a Supreme Court that, as we already discussed, is emboldened and kind of reckless in this moment. So we're up against is pretty strong. But we have to stand strong and stay focused and powerful, keep our eyes on the prize, which we always do. What's next for you? Yeah, I'm going to take a minute, catch my breath. I'm going

to write this book that I think is important. I think that's also part of civil rights work is some of us taking a minute to put the pieces together and talk about where we are and how we get where we want to go. And then I'll be thinking about the next way that I am supposed to contribute to this work. This is my life's work. But I'm mostly I'm unashamed to say I'm proud, proud of what I've been able to accomplish. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing what you do and thank you for all that

you've already done. I appreciate it. Thank you, and neither thank you for all you've done. Ivol has identified a wide range of inequities and the small and big actions needed to dismand told them like ifol I look at what lies ahead with clear eyes, sustainable progress is not easy. So how do we move forward. I'm struck by Eiffel's emphasis on the interconnectedness of civil rights issues and the need for civil rights leaders to speak with one voice.

This is a path we need to follow. On the next episode, I'm speaking with a comedian and filmmaker w Canal Bell about his new documentary series We Need to Talk About Cosby. Bill Cosby is the trojan horse for having the bigger conversation about rape culture in America. And it's not a conversation that lots of people want to have. More people say no than yes. But the people showed up really shut up, including many of the survivors. And look for a special episode in time for the Oscars.

I'll be talking with the President of the Academy of Motion Pictures, Don Hudson about the academy recent changes in the aftermath of Oscar So White. Getting Even is a production of Pushkin Industries and is written and hosted by me Anita Hill. It is produced by Mola Board and Brittany Brown. Our editor is Sarah Kramer, our engineer is Amanda kay Wang, and our showrunner is Sasha Matthias. Luis Gara composed original music for the show. Our Executive producers

are Mia Lobel and Lee tal malad Our. Director of Development is Justine Lane. At Pushkin thanks to Heather Fane, Carly Migliori, Jason Gambrel, Julia Barton, John Schnarz, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Anita Hill and on Facebook at Anita Hill. You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin Pods, and you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot Fm. If you love this show and others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing

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