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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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November 27, 2012

By Jenée Desmond-Harris, theRoot

Sherrilyn Ifill, the new president of the NAACP LDF, shares her vision of justice.

The NAACP announced this week that attorney and law professor Sherrilyn Ifill will be the LDF’s (Legal Defense Fund’s) next president and director counsel [beginning in January 2013].

Sherrilyn Ifill, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law, will chart a new course for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund as its new head.

Perhaps best known for its role in the landmark school-desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education, LDF has worked for decades to expand political participation, forestall injustice in the criminal-justice system, broaden avenues of educational opportunity, defend economic freedoms and further the nomination and appointment of fair-minded and diverse judges through impact litigation and advocacy.

“LDF changed America,” Ifill told The Root. “But too many have been left behind, and the opening of the door is getting narrower and narrower….

We can no longer assume that generations of Americans understand the importance of racial justice and equality, or even what those words mean. We cannot assume that even all of the judges we face understand the history, intended purpose or effect of our civil rights laws and statutes on the individuals they were designed to protect.

And we are confronted with the task of identifying civil rights problems that look very different from those in the past but have the effect of perpetuating racial inequality.”

Read the full interview here.

Ifill has since shown support for Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

More stories like this.

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