“There were three newspapers every day. We might not have dinner, but we had the papers.”
Sherrilyn Ifill is smiling as she tells me about a childhood both difficult and enriching. Our conversation takes place over Zoom and spans three time zones, but when she looks up toward the ceiling, I know she is accessing the legendary, nearly photographic memory that has made her one of the preeminent civil rights lawyers of our time.
As president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Ifill is an unrelenting champion with a stellar reputation among civil rights leaders—but as with most superheroes, her name is probably one you don’t know.
