The following conversation took place on April 5, 2024, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as part of the thirtieth anniversary celebrations for the Center for the Study of the American South and Southern Cultures, and the launch of the journal’s special issue, The Vote, guest edited by Errin Haines. This conversation has been edited and condensed.

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Errin Haines: I’m deeply honored to be in conversation with someone who I consider to be an American hero. Somebody who’s devoted her life to really helping to protect our union and to hold our democracy to the ideals that were set forth by our nation’s framework; to really make America more free, more fair, and more equal for all of us. So, Sherrilyn, it is really good to be with you. I think it’s really important and it feels very urgent to be with you at this moment in our country’s history, in our region’s history, and as we consider our collective future as a nation. So, let’s get started with the conversation. 

I want to ask you to just reflect a little bit. In your career, you have seen and you have responded to the progress and the setbacks in this country on the fight for racial equality, a lot of which was forged, quite frankly, in this part of the country. So many people whose careers I know inspired you met that moment to push our democracy forward. And there have been times when you have had to meet the moment as well. Can you give an example of what that looked like early in your career and how you’ve seen that fight change and what it means for you to meet the moment now?

Sherrilyn Ifill: Well, that just sounds like so much. [laughs] I don’t think I can really lay it all out. But I can say a few things. I grew up seeing documentaries about the Civil Rights Movement and just being enraptured by what I saw and wanting really to be a part of it. And I will say that it has been the privilege of my life to have a dream that I can be a part of and then to be a part of it. No matter how challenging the work has been, that has always felt magical and unbelievable to me. It’s also [included] pressure because you are aware of these extraordinary people who came before you. I always said, about working at the Legal Defense Fund, that I knew I was in the place with the smartest people I was ever going to meet in in my life, and that has still been true, and I’m a lot older than when I first started. 

When I was a little girl—of course, this was the time of the Watergate hearings, and I’ve talked about what it meant to me to see Barbara Jordan, to hear her, and to feel like a bell kind of went off in my head what was powerful about her and what was attractive about her to me. 

There were Black women on television. They were all very traditionally beautiful. You know, Denise Nicholas in Room 222, Diahann Carroll in Julia, Barbara McNair’s show. Barbara Jordan was not on television because she was pretty or could sing or act. She was what we would call a handsome woman, but she wasn’t decorative. And she had this extraordinary voice. You have to understand how awful the Watergate hearings were for those kids like me who didn’t go to summer camp. We just stayed home in the summer, so we watched TV a lot. And it was on every day. All day. [laughter] We had five channels, and you would just keep turning, and you just kept hoping that maybe, maybe, they’re going to put on the Young and the Restless. Maybe they’ll put on one of the soaps today. And you’d just be lying there in the heat, no air conditioning in your house, just watching this boring, awful trial, waiting for something to happen.

Then one day—I still remember the day—it was not boring. It was the day that John Dean came and testified. He seemed kind of youngish. He had a very stylish wife, Maureen Dean. Remember? She had the platinum hair with the part in the middle, kind of pulled back, and a white coat. And we were like, Hey, hey, hey, what’s going on? Soon, witnesses were talking about tapes, and it was getting juicy. And so that’s actually why I was paying attention when Barbara Jordan spoke. 

EH: You were tuning in.

SI: Yeah. In my family we are all political junkies. It comes mostly from my dad. We watched the news every night, we had three newspapers in the house at all times. So that was the reason I was kind of tuned in. If you haven’t seen the video, it’s on YouTube. You can hear Barbara Jordan talking about the Constitution in that Barbara Jordan voice, and I’ve never forgotten it, because she was owning this thing that, even at that age, I knew kind of like wasn’t really meant for us. 

EH: Yes. And Black people everywhere. 

SI: Exactly. She was owning it in a way that she refused to speak from a place of kind of second-class citizenship. And she kept saying, My allegiance is to the Constitution, and I will not be shaken from it. And here she was, calling the President of the United States to account because of her allegiance to the Constitution. And I will say that may be, as I think about it—I’m just saying this now for the first time—the moment of citizenship formation for me. Because she was modeling for me that you could have a troubled relationship with this country and its documents and still claim your place here. And still demand it in the most powerful way. I was in New York and Shirley Chisholm was running for President. So, it was a powerful time. 

EH: We are situated in the South. We are here celebrating the Center for the Study of the American South and the work that is being done here. And we’re thinking about the power of story, which you have started to talk about, and the power of the most honest and accurate story of who we are as a country. Knowing that the South is a place with a painful history, yes, but also a history where progress was made, where the battles of our democracy were forged. And so, as we again find ourselves at a crossroads in the future of our democracy, the South, it seems to me, has a role to play. I wonder what that kind of role might look like in this part of the country. What lessons can we take from what this part of the country as we think about our current moment? 

SI: I start from the from the place that I’m from—I’m originally from New York. But I am always mindful that the majority of Black people in this country have lived, and do live in, the South. That has always been true. Fifty-two percent of Black people live in the South. So, if you purport to be engaged in work that is associated with racial equality and you somehow don’t think that the South is relevant to that, and if you believe, like I believe, that what ails this country will never be resolved—that this country will never be a healthy democracy until it has the tools and it is prepared to use the tools to confront and engage not only its history, but its current reality of racial inequality and injustice—that’s the project. 

[The South] is where the worst things have happened and, also, the most noble and the best. And so, I think it’s not surprising that we would find ourselves returning to do the work in the places that have had such significance, right? 

EH: Really any conversation in our current moment around the erosion of rights. 

SI: Yes. 

EH: You can look here both for the offense and the potential for solution. 

SI: Yes. And the only reason it’s not been in the center of the conversation is because we have allowed our conversation about democracy to be hijacked by the idea that our democracy is all about presidential elections every four years. And because it’s deemed to be about presidential elections every four years, that means that our focus and conversation about what’s going to happen politically and about what’s going to be the future of our democracy is driven by a fixation on what we call the swing states. And so that means there’s a lot of “heartlands” talk, there’s a lot of “forgotten America” focus, rural, all that stuff. It’s a lot of all of that every four years. And that’s what the media tends to focus on. 

Then both parties have decided which states are red states and which are blue states. And if you’re red, you get written off by the Democratic Party. And if you’re a blue state, you’re written off by the Republican Party. But as I’ve always said, most Black people live in red states. What’s the state that has the largest population of Black people in actual numbers? Texas. And I’ve got friends who really think it’s Brooklyn. [laughter] You know I’m right.

EH: Bless their hearts. 

SI: You know, there are people who think the liberation of Black people runs through Fulton Street. Or Detroit or Chicago. And I’m like, this is not going to be the place. 

EH: Oh my gosh, we have so much work to do.

SI: But it’s Texas, right? So many people say, Oh, forget about Texas. Oh, it’s so outrageous. No. The reason we remain deeply engaged with Texas is that, numerically, that’s where most Black people live. And I don’t think even most Black people in this country know that to be true. 

EH: Sherrilyn, every time that I talk to you, I come away smarter. I don’t know anybody that knows the Constitution better than you. And to your point, I think your tenure at LDF, it requires a certain imagination, creativity, and brilliance, right? To be able to challenge racial injustice and to be able to really hold this country to account in the ways that our founding documents, and even the amendments to our founding documents, require us to do. 

You may remember last summer when you announced that you were going to be joining the faculty at Howard as the inaugural Vernon E. Jordan, Atlantan, Endowed Chair in Civil Rights. [applause] I was very heartened by your announcement. This came after the announcement of my other dear sister in this work, Nikole Hannah-Jones, esteemed alumna of this institution, announced that she was going to Howard to launch the Center for Journalism and Democracy. Stacey Abrams, also through Atlanta, was headed to Howard, she was going to be the inaugural Ronald W. Walters Endowed Chair for Race and Black Politics. And so, to me, when you came, it completed this trifecta of this powerful coalition of Black women—each of you in your own way—holding those who seek to maintain injustice accountable. 

And I know because I talk to all of you, it just seems to me that the decision to go to Howard felt very intentional—positioning you all squarely in this legacy of HBCU educators who are literally training the next generation that [will] fight on the front lines of the battle for civil rights in this country. I’m going to ask you to put it in your own words. Talk about why you decided to do this. Why now? Why Howard? What does success look like to you for this role? 

SI: In 2016, right after the presidential election, it was kind of a grim time. I did a previously scheduled panel like a week after the election with Isabel Wilkerson and Taylor Branch. I don’t know if it was my imagination or my spirit, but it was dark, even on the stage. But I was being the way I am, which is always optimistic about what is possible. And Isabel was being who she is, which is kind of a Cassandra. She’s quite prescient if you really listen to her. 

I was saying, Well, here’s what I think we have to do, and I was being upbeat. And she said, No, no, no, I honestly believe we’re entering the nadir. The nadir was the term coined by historian Rayford Logan for the worst period for Black people after slavery—kind of the 1890s into the 1920s and early 1930s. And, I said, Well, I agree to disagree. And then the program ended, and, it’s Isabel, so I was like, OK, I’m going to have to assume [she’s] right. You know, Jesus, like, what? [laughter] 

So, I started to research about what we did do during the nadir. And we did lots of things. I mean, there was still lots of litigation happening. I’m just now learning about the Mutual United Brotherhood of Liberty that was based in Baltimore, and it was a group of Black men who created this organization that existed for a short period of time but was very influential. It was from, like, 1885—so it was right after the civil rights cases that began to kind of turn back Reconstruction—until about 1895. They were building schools. Many of them were clergy people. They were bringing their own challenges, their legal challenges. They wrote a whole book, which I am trying to get through, that they did as a conversation between a fictional journalist and a fictional Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, commenting on the various cases and how the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were being hijacked. I mean, when you read how they describe what they call thinly veiled judicial hijacking of these amendments, it makes you kind of sick on your stomach because you’re like, they’re writing this book in 1889 and they already saw it.

EH: Our imagination. 

SI: This is what I’m saying. So, I’m just learning about it. I mean, I’m in Baltimore, where I’m always stanning for Baltimore. Have you heard of the Mutual United Brotherhood of Liberty?

EH: Never. I’m like, where can I get the book?

SI: I’m sending you the book. That’s just an example of some of the things that happened. But what I particularly focused on was the way in which so much of the work was institution building. So, if you think about when the NAACP was formed, if you think about [when] many of the Black fraternities and sororities were formed, like the Deltas. If you think about [when] a lot of the institutions were being built and strengthened, [it was] during the nadir. And so, I thought, if we are in the nadir, the most important thing is that we make sure we build and strengthen our own institutions. Because the nadir, it turns out, is the planting time.

The Civil Rights Movement is not [just] all the stuff you see on the top when you’ve got the harvest going. There’s a period of it that’s planting the seeds, that’s strengthening the foundation, that’s strengthening the institutions. I had my students the other day, we spent a whole bunch of time on A. Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Because if you don’t understand that movement, the creation of the first Black labor union—those men who were doing that job, they were the parents and the grandparents of Thurgood Marshall and Elaine Jones—then you can’t understand who came later. You don’t understand this is how these people were able to live and how they were able to begin to understand the power of organizing. All of this is happening in the so-called nadir, right? And so when I was thinking about where I would go and all the lovely places where I would love to teach, what I felt was that this moment calls for ensuring that our institutions [thrive]. 

If we are in the nadir, the most important thing is that we make sure we build and strengthen our own institutions. Because the nadir, it turns out, is the planting time.

As proud as I am of what we were able to accomplish on the outside [at LDF]—the litigation and the organizing and the policy challenges and so forth—I am as proud of what I was able to do behind the curtain, which is the strengthening of the organization. This is why I was unabashed about raising the money and about paying off the mortgage and transforming the space and upgrading our IT and raising money to raise the attorneys’ salaries.

EH: Infrastructure building.

SI: Just the whole infrastructure of the thing, because that’s the institution building. I can’t control what is going to happen in this country. I like to believe I can. And I want to believe that we can hold on to democracy. But what if we don’t? We still have to survive.

EH: Ensure that the institution is going to.

SI: Yes. What you’re trying to do is do the planting in this period so that the sprout can happen when the conditions are right. I may not even be around when the conditions are perfect, but I hope that I will have been around to plant the seeds. That’s why we created the Marshall-Motley Scholarship. When I came here to see Julius Chambers, who was dying during the first couple of weeks that I took the job at LDF, I said, Well, what’s the secret? And Julius was like, You tell me what’s the secret. [laughter] But he did say, make sure that you are focused on what we call our cooperating attorneys—the local attorneys in the South with whom LDF did their work. And a week or so later, he sent me a letter saying the same thing, which I hung up in my office. And that became for me the beginning of thinking about creating a scholarship program that would allow us to grow attorneys in the South. And then completely without my provocation, a donor came, and we began a five-year discussion about the scholarship, which we were able to create, the Marshall-Motley Scholarship, which pays the full ride for law school, laptops, housing, tuition, everything. Gives you summer jobs at civil rights organizations, a two-year fellowship after you graduate at civil rights legal organizations. And then you have to make an eight-year commitment to civil rights litigation on racial justice issues in the South. [applause] We’re up to thirty and almost all of them have come from the South. And so, later tonight, I will be chilling with a glass of wine because I know that there are generations of troops who are coming to complete the work. And that’s something on the docket. [applause]

There are people who are very frustrated, and they’re like, where’s our Civil Rights Movement? It’s happening. It’s happening. But maybe this is the planting time and the seeding time. And the harvest will come at the right time. 

EH: Well, thank you for being a sower for our democracy, wherever that is going to be headed from here. 

Audience member: I’m a medical historian, and I wrote about a book about the medical civil rights movement. And your points about the importance of Black institution building during the nadir, Black hospitals and Black medical societies were certainly a part of that. And you’re talking also about this important in-between period. Even in the 1930s and to the 1950s, that’s when the Civil Rights Movement is really getting off the ground, laying the groundwork. So, my question to you is what can that teach us? Or how can it lead us into the twenty-first century? How can we reclaim some of the gains that they got and have been taken away or eroded? And so, can you speak to the health care aspect of all of this?

EH: And if I can just piggyback on her question, Sherrilyn, and speak to folks in the medical community, folks like the folks that you were learning about from the nadir, in the insurance industry. These are people who got off the sidelines and got involved in this democracy, not necessarily politicians or activists, but they understood that they needed to meet this moment in our democracy. She’s asking about lessons that we can learn from just everyday ordinary folks like that, as we go forth in this conversation.

SI: Yes, I think that’s the key. We have adopted a vision of civil rights or democracy work as having become professionalized. 

EH: It has to be Thurgood Marshall, it has to be you.

SI: And so, people are always saying like, “Well, what are y’all doing?” Well, what are you doing? 

EH: What are you doing? Exactly.

SI: I do think that there’s a sense that we’re waiting for this big strategy. Those folks did not know what was going to happen. The only way I was able to do the job that I did was that Taylor Branch was doing a forum in Baltimore, and I snuck in the back, and I was late. He was talking to Diane Nash, the great civil rights and SNCC leader and so forth. And he said something that I wrote down in my little black book that allowed me to be able to take the job at LDF. He said activists during the Civil Rights Movement were perpetually anxious. I was like, Oh, so they didn’t know everything. 

EH: They didn’t have all the answers.

SI: With 20/20 hindsight, it looks like a brilliant strategy. People say that about Brown [v. Board of Education of Topeka] too, which actually had a circuitous route. And people just don’t understand how the pieces all fit together. So, I think that number one is not thinking that there’s civil rights in a box that you open up and it has all the steps, that civil rights work is perpetuated by people who are professionally trained to be civil rights leaders. I think also, I am not in the reclamation business anymore. I’m not trying to get back anything that we had. I’ve done this work long enough to know how much we compromised, even in our wins. And so, one of the reasons I’m doing the Fourteenth Amendment Project is to try to do the work of imagining how we build, plan strategies, and work campaigns to create the democracy that we actually want. 

I am not interested in going back to any period. I don’t think it was Shangri-La when President Obama was in office or when President Clinton was in office. Jack Boger and Ted Shaw are here, and if it was so great in the past, they would have been out of work. I’m not nostalgic for any period in this country. I am nostalgic for 1970s R&B music. [laughter] But I am not nostalgic for any period, because there is no period in which we were ever getting the things that we really wanted. There were compromises that we became satisfied with, there were crumbs that allowed us to eat something that day, but they were not the vision. We talk about health care. I mean, goodness gracious, have we ever had a truly functioning, rational, humane health care system in this country? 

EH: No, we’ve never had ourselves a fully healthy democracy. 

SI: Yes. And so, that’s the project that I see for the remaining years that I am able to do this work, the work of trying to create the democracy that we dreamed of. That was suggested by the Fourteenth Amendment, one in which you have this soaring promise, one in which you can engage ideas of citizenship. You get an amendment in which the word “equal” for the first time appears in the Constitution, but I’m supposed to get all excited about Madison and Hamilton? No, I want to start with that exciting promise, and I want to do that work, to build what we really want and not to start with the compromise. And I actually believe that that’s what this moment is calling for, because the opportunity to create something fresh and new only happens when the old has been unraveled and discredited and delegitimized. And that’s where we are. We’ve run out of runway on the democracy you and I grew up with. That’s not going to happen. It’s not even working anymore. It’s not sustainable. 

So we have to do something new. And the question is, are we going to be bold enough to reach for the new thing that we really want? Or are we going to think it’s good enough if we can just get ourselves back to a period when we could breathe a little freer? There are compromises to be made, I’m no fool, there are political compromises to be made. To me, all of those compromises are to be made to give us a little bit more breathing space, to be able to fight for the things we really want, not because I want to stay there. 

Are we going to be bold enough to reach for the new thing that we really want? Or are we going to think it’s good enough if we can just get ourselves back to a period when we could breathe a little freer?

Audience member: You’re talking about community building and also the most recent issues of voting. And talking about language, I’m really curious as to your reflections on the best ways to realize language, especially in legal work, to inspire action. 

SI: Power, that’s really what I want to talk about is power. 

EH: The power of the voter. 

SI: Not just as an individual. I always repeat what I heard Lani Guinier say when I first joined LDF, which was that, like the people who were fighting for voting rights power—the Fannie Lou Hamers, the Victoria Grays, and so forth—what did they want voting for? Yes, there is a dignity aspect to it. There is a citizenship aspect to it. But they believed that the power of the vote would allow them to change the material conditions of their lives and their communities’ lives. So we’re not talking about voting that way. It’s boring. And I think we have to begin to now talk about voting as power. The problem is, for those of us, and I consider myself one, in the progressive space—we are a little nervous about power. We feel like it’s unseemly. And I get it, because absolute power corrupts absolutely. But it’s absolute power that corrupts absolutely, you know, not just power. And I think we have to trust our integrity enough to believe that we will use power appropriately. 

EH: Power is agency. 

SI: Power is agency. Power is love. And so, I think, we have to begin to talk about it as power. The only way you can talk about it as power is to stop talking about voting as though it’s something that happens every four years for someone that lives many, many, many miles away from you. 

EH: And to not talk about it as a burden, right? 

SI: I think people talk about it in high-minded ways. I would say that about jury service, which is the other thing that’s happening. 

EH: I feel like that’s how people talk about voting. 

SI: I don’t think so. 

EH: They’re like, Oh, we have to save democracy. It’s like, why aren’t you excited? I love voting!

SI: Oh, I see what you mean. 

EH: I mean, I still feel like this is a privilege, and it is a thing that we all get to do. 

SI: Yeah, but I think even when we talk about it in a high-minded way, we’re still not talking about it as high-minded voting for the recorder of deeds, right? We’re not talking about it for the probate judge or the school board. Now everybody’s paying attention to school boards because other people recognize that power. But because we have been herded into this every four years, it’s all about the President, we can’t feel it and we can’t feel the power of it. The probate judge in Alabama, that’s the guy I call on Election Day because the probate judge oversees all the polling places and the elections. So, when we can’t get into a polling place or it’s closed too early or something, you have to call the probate judge, but who cares about the probate judge election, right? 

There are elections every year. Next year, there will be elections in North Carolina. There will be some municipal elections. There’ll be elections for sheriffs. Are we aware now that sheriffs are kind of important? Because we have a whole group of sheriffs who call themselves constitutional sheriffs. They think that they’re the only actual law enforcement in the country, and they can abscond with ballot boxes and so forth. So, who pays attention to sheriffs? Sheriffs are the people who evict people, and it matters how that’s done. There’s an actual platform for sheriffs. We have one in Baltimore. We’re like, this is how we’re going to do it, we’re not going to humiliate people in this way. We’re not going to do notices—it matters. But we’re not talking about voting for sheriff. That’s not the power that we’re asking people to unleash. We’re not talking about the recorder of deeds. We’re not talking about the Public Service Commission or the Railroad Commissioner in Texas. Who is a railroad commissioner? Or the Public Service Commission? 

EH: They don’t even know who those people are. 

SI: Or whatever initiatives are on the ballot. This year, yes, because it’s abortion. But what about when they’re deciding whether they’re going to allocate money for the library or for the municipal pool? Like, have you read those before you go into the voting booth? What are we doing? And when I say we, I mean us because we’re probably the people who vote all the time and some of us are maybe even the people who say, Oh, all those younger people, they don’t understand. But most of us don’t vote like you’re supposed to vote. 

What I want to see is a different way of talking about voting being unequivocal about the desire and the need for power to make change. The only way you make change is with power. We want the Supreme Court to be different, there has to be power. If you want Congress to work differently, there has to be power. If you want a different healthcare system, there has to be power. None of it’s going to happen without power. And if we are too delicate to engage power, then we’re not going to have any of those things. 

EH: And we’re not going to have any power.

What I want to see is a different way of talking about voting being unequivocal about the desire and the need for power to make change. The only way you make change is with power.

SI: We’re not going to have any power, and no change is going to happen. Or if the change happens, it’s going to be by those people who are unafraid to wield power. And unfortunately, those very often are the people who are going to wield it without integrity or illegitimately. Those of us who have integrity have just decided that we’re too delicate to be bothered with actually taking power and engaging in muscular votes and counting. And I’m like, count the damn votes. Let’s do this. We don’t want it to be a split decision. Like all of this foolishness, we have to stop it. Power is power. And it is the only avenue to make change. And always remembering that nexus. What do you want the power for? Not so you can say your man or your woman won or your party won. You want power because here’s the agenda. Here are the three things that we’re hoping we can accomplish in the next six years. But we can’t do it unless we have the power. That’s the way we have to start talking. 

And by the way, a different session, but the same with jury service, because the idea that these are the two things. Gosh, the original framers thought jury service was even more important than voting. I mean, we needed the Supreme Court to say in Strauder v. West Virginia, you couldn’t keep Black people off juries. And we’re like, well, I don’t want to go to jury service. So, what do we need to get to convince people to sit on juries? Some people have legitimate reasons. I haven’t heard the platform of how we’re going to require employers to give people the time off to serve on juries. Or how are we are going to require a level of payment that makes it work? These are platforms, we could do this.

SI: I knew saying jury duty was going to get you wound up! We have to end this, but thank you so much, Sherrilyn.

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