Sherrilyn Ifill wanted to be a civil rights lawyer since she was a little girl.
But at no point during her childhood did she ever think she would someday lead the historic NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the organization that successfully fought and won the 1954 landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education.
“From Thurgood Marshall to Sherillyn Ifill does not feel like a logical trajectory,” says Ifill in a recent interview before she took the helm of the 72-year-old organization this month. “But it’s an honor.”
For the last 20 years, Ifill has been a high-profile law professor at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, where her research and scholarship have broken new ground and have been lauded by other academicians in her field.
In her 2007 book, On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century, she examines the history of racial violence in the state of Maryland. And she has kept busy as a legal commentator for various news outlets. “There is a national conversation almost always happening around race,” says Ifill, who lives in Baltimore. “I’ve tried to be active in that public sphere.”
Although she has been training a legion of students interested in becoming lawyers for nearly two decades, she’s continued to practice law and says that she’s ready for her new job as the seventh director-counsel at LDF and only the second woman to lead the organization since it was founded in 1940.
“I’ve kept my litigation muscles quite developed,” she says. “I never stopped practicing.”
