YouSaid · the spoken record

Sherrilyn Ifill

lines on the record: 84
first: 2019-01-17
most recent: 2019-01-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But you know, people who come out for the mayoral election. I know they will. I know they'll. But no, I agree with you completely.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Muscl Absolutely. Highest turnout for any midterm in memory. People coming out, I always say that their elections happening all the time and that's always my exhortation and I won't get off this podcast until I say that. Every year there are elections. There are not elections every two years. There are not elections every four years. There are elections every year. This year, wherever you are, there's an election for a railroad commissioner, county commission, school board.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Education, it's a terrible thing, but it's also true that that pressure is compelling us to push in ways that we haven't in some time. And I have to say there is almost a freeing as well because the other side has made their intentions So explicit, maybe in ways that previous iterations would have been too polite to do, that it allows us also to be honest about what we want”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Organizing and movements and political power, it's all happening at the same time. And I'm just hopeful enough to believe that what's going to be on the other side of this is going to be transformational. It's going to allow us to go back and address maybe some of the things that we compromised on or that we didn't push hard enough on or that we didn't fully address. And that's what has to happen. The circle has to loop back. And then you go back and you pick up some of the things that you maybe put down and you press even harder on them. And so that's the moment that we're in. We can recognize it's terrible. It is a terrible thing to see families separated at the border. It's a terrible thing to hear the ugly rhetoric from this president. It is a terrible thing that federal government workers are out of work and not getting pay and there's very little compassion about this. It is terrible to see the ways in which the rollback on civil rights has happened in almost every area and housing and”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was an awful time in many ways, many lives lost, and those of us who reaped the rewards of the sacrifice of those martyrs and of the people who came together to make that moment happen should recognize that it's just our turn to be under pressure and to have to make transformation happen. So as exhausting as it is, because every day you just don't even know what the Trump administration is going to do. I was saying last night, you know, The Legal Defense Fund since 2016, we've sued six cabinet members. That's not usually what we do. I mean, we're suing governors and local officials. It's voting rights cases. We have criminal justice. We do criminal defense work, capital punishment. We do economic justice work, housing discrimination, and so forth. This is astonishing that we have to take our resources to do this. It's a tremendous amount of pressure. But together with this, the other elements of what I think of as the justice ecosystem,”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The pressure of the moment. Particularly with the Trump presidency, particularly with the rise of explicit and open white supremacy. Has created such a pressure that we're all almost coming together and rising to do our best work. The litigators, the political scene where we're seeing young politicians come out and be exciting and want to challenge the orthodoxy. And we're seeing young activists who are coming out and marching, who are making their demand, who are educating themselves, who are creating their own organizations. And all of those things are coming together in a way that is super powerful. And we talk all the time about how difficult this moment seems, but that's when transformation happens. What do people think the civil rights movement was? Fun and games, it was a time of tremendous challenge of physical peril.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And seeing them, seeing their dedication, seeing their hard work, seeing how smart they are. I mean, you know, you just know that there are people ready to do this work and who are thinking in different ways. Every generation is more unshackled by some of the restrictions of the generation before them, how you talk about issues, your willingness to confront issues, the creativity of your thinking, and so forth. So to see kind of unfettered young civil rights lawyers is really astonishing and wonderful for me, but also to see that we're in a movement time and to see this time of young activists really beginning with Ferguson and continuing through parkland. This is a time in which young people are very conscious, in which they are willing to put themselves on the line, in which they're willing to make sacrifices very much like young people in the civil rights movement. I was saying this last night with Reverend Barbara, we're in one of those moments where”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that feeling that there is another generation that is doing extraordinary work at the Legal Defense Fund, most of our attorneys are younger, young, really. Many of them are women. Many of them have young children, by the way. And one of the great joys for me has been to create an environment and a conversation about how you have a family and do this work that I would have enjoyed very much as a young lawyer. And so I'm very proud of that.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where I started to encounter my students in my work. And there was nothing more exciting. I regarded myself as creating the next generation of civil rights lawyers, and many of them are civil rights lawyers.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, so to the first thing you said, that's part of what gives me hope. The fact that there is a relay race. Relay races are always going forward and you are passing that baton and you're running your stretch. You don't have to run the whole thing. You do have to run as fast as you can. And you do have to have some level of coordination with the person behind you and the person ahead of you to be able to receive the baton and to be able to give the baton, not drop it, but give it. And so I'm running my race as fast as I can. And what gives me hope is one of the great things, so I taught for 20 years at University of Maryland Law School. And there came a point.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the Senate judiciary committee has to do better at this, has to take seriously the sacred trust of confirming justices and judges for our federal courts. Judges should not sit on our federal courts who are not competent. And if we can't even agree on that, something is very, very wrong.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that should be partisan competence? So this is deeply worrying to me because for me, you know, particularly when you think about the trial courts, I like to have a sharp judge who knows how to conduct a trial, who knows what evidence should be admitted, who knows whether an objection should be sustained or overruled, right? who understands how to manage discovery. That's what we want because we want the fair opportunity to litigate our case and to be able to make our record. We're not asking for a thumb on the scale. But when you have judges who haven't themselves actively litigated and don't know, we have to really worry about whether those judges will be more inclined to dismiss cases on a motion to dismiss or on summary judgment, whether they will make correct rulings. And it's very difficult to overturn the decisions of trial court judges. So, you know, we're concerned at the competence level also. And I really believe”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I see nominees who don't have the requisite experience to sit on the bench, and yet they're being passed through, there are several nominees who've been rated unqualified by the American Bar Association who have been confirmed.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm not questioning your premise. He didn't, but it just needs to be pointed out. And what was great about it was that the person who was asking those questions was a Republican senator was Senator Kennedy. And so I really appreciated him for that. And I've actually sat in the room and heard Senator Kennedy ask very rigorous questions of nominees about practice, about just how you litigate cases, which I think is really important. So when I see these competence issues, it worries me.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, many of us saw the video of a judicial nominee who sat before the committee and couldn't answer very basic questions, you know, what's emotion and limity and so forth. And it was clear that this was not someone who should be a judge who had very limited, if any, litigation experience. First of all, we should be asking ourselves how he got to a confirmation hearing.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How to put on a case, we know how to make a record. What I have seen with some of the Trump nominees is deeply troubling. It's not just the ideology. It's not that just that he has appointed judges who feel themselves unable to say that Brown v. Board of Education was correctly decided. Brown vs. Board of Education is not just another decision. It is actually part of the legal canon. It actually means, in my view, that you have doubts about the rule of law. The rule of law is non-discrimination. And so the inability to say that and to say that with clarity and to say, you know, I'm a judge and I can't comment on cases, you can't comment on cases that you think might come back before you. Do you think Brown vs. Board of Education is going to come back before you? So I take issue with those judicial nominees who found that they couldn't say that Brown versus Board of Education was correctly decided and who now sit on the bench. But I'm also seeing something that should trouble everyone, and that is a level of incompetence.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely The court giveth and the court taketh away. But I guess my initial point is I'm talking now about the power, right? The power of courts to transform the course of our democracy cannot be Underestimated. And so we take very seriously appointments to the federal bench. And I recognize that the bench is not going to be filled with judges who share my views about the law. Even when there are presidents whose views are closer to my own, that's not really the issue. The question is whether or not litigants feel they can get a fair hearing before a judge, whether they believe they have a chance. I always say about LDF lawyers and our work, we very often appear before conservative courts. The Texas voter ID case, we took to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals when the most conservative in the country, and we still prevailed. I believe that if we have the opportunity to litigate in front of a competent judge that is prepared to do their job, I like our chances.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we should not forget that this is the 65th anniversary of Brown. This was not a ballot initiative. It was not by presidential decree. It was United States Supreme Court recognizing that the words of the 14th Amendment that require equal protection of the laws mean what they say. The Supreme Court.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we will see. You know, the federal judiciary is critically important. If we think about our history and we think about the transformations in this country that almost everyone will say are transformations that brought us closer to being a place of justice and democracy, if we think about Brown versus Board of Education, in which the United States Supreme Court essentially said that racial apartheid is unconstitutional.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. The harsher penalties 100 to 1 originally until the Fair Sentencing Act brought it down to 18 to 1. It should be one to one, but it wasn't. To me, I find this astonishing. The disparate treatment of African Americans in the criminal justice system.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, it's a red line. You've got to be able to at least admit that that reality exists, what you think should be done about it, we may disagree on what the prescriptions are for that. But to simply deny the reality of the problem in his colloquy with Senator Booker, you know, he indicated there were things he hadn't seen and that he wanted to look at. I think this is a really critically important problem that you should have been reading about. You should know about this. And so to not be fully conversant in the scholarship, in the studies, in the reality, and in the effects of that is quite astonishing to me. There was just a first step back, just a criminal justice reform bill that was passed, and part of it was applying retroactivity to the Fair Sentencing Act, which was designed to address the crack cocaine disparity, which nobody thinks was based on anything other than race. It certainly was not pharma.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Listen, if that in 2019 can be your belief And you are a nominee to head up the most important law enforcement system in maybe the world. And you're not able to see this is not Cheryl and Eiffel's view and opinion. It is the empirical data about what happens in our criminal justice system that controls for similar records, similar crime, and so forth. All of the evidence is there if you wish to see the ways in which African Americans are treated differently in the criminal justice system. And to have Mr. Barr in 2019 say that.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More contrary to the conversations that have been happening in this country around the effects of mass incarceration on the African American community, I would like to see, you know, he did appear before the committee yesterday. I would have liked to see more detailed questions about the issue of unconstitutional policing. And there's a statute. The law enforcement misconduct statute that empowers only the Attorney General to engage in these pattern and practice investigations. And that was abandoned by Jeff Sessions. And I think that's an important question for Attorney General Barr. It's quite serious. He articulated a view of the Voting Rights Act yesterday in which he said he thought that voting rights needed to be protected. Right now, the Department of Justice is engaged in no real voting rights litigation. So we have real questions about that. But to your point about the judges, before we...”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in fact, the nominee has a very strong history of believing in the incarceration as the linchpin of how you control crime. He wrote an article called The Case for More Incarceration. I can't imagine anything.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The department to come in and investigate unconstitutional policing as they did in Ferguson, as they did in Baltimore, which resulted in the consent decrees that we hope will have a transformational effect. Jeff Sessions reversed all of that. He's made clear he will not investigate police departments for patterns and practices of discrimination. And so, of course, this is a question that we should have for the new Attorney General. But then we'll make it.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That came about in the Obama administration, in which we were able to work shoulder to shoulder with the Attorney General's office to move forward civil rights initiatives that are powerful and important. And the nomination and confirmation of Jeff Sessions ended all of that. He has reversed everything. If you just look at the policing context, this country was riveted by videos of police officers killing unarmed African Americans, Eric Garner, Walter Scott in South Carolina, all of these images that we've seen. And the role that the Obama administration took was to create this commission to study 21st century policing. People can remember Eric Holder going to Ferguson. People can remember the Attorney General going to Baltimore. These were moments when it required leadership and when it required an opportunity to really talk about an issue that has lived in the African American community for decades. And it also required the resources of”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, before we even get to the judicial nominations, let's talk about what it means to appoint an attorney general. The Attorney General is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States The day of the Shelby County decision civil rights advocates marched immediately over the Department of Justice and we sat down with Eric Holder, the then Attorney General, in which he pledged to commit the resources of the Department of Justice and the Civil Rights Division to ensuring that we protected the voting rights of African Americans, and we worked shoulder to shoulder, in fact. We worked shoulder to shoulder on that Texas voter ID case. What it means to have a Department of Justice that understands the need for criminal justice reform that has this disproportionate effect on African American communities. And so Eric Holder's smart armed crime initiative so that U.S. attorneys were not overcharging what it meant to have a department that understands the ways in which African American students are disparately punished in schools that leads to the school-to-prison pipeline and creating guidance to address that, or guidance to address the misuse of criminal backgrounds checks by employers. All of these things are initial.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To progress and would not have accepted that just an inch below the surface was precisely what we see now, and those of us who are civil rights lawyers who are out in the country litigating these cases, we do see it. And so in a way, as difficult as this is, it has surfaced something that we knew was underneath the surface.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I think about our conversations about white supremacy and I think about how we all felt when we saw that march in Charlottesville and how repugnant and how vile that was and the failure of the president to respond in the way we would think a president of the United States would respond, we all are joined in that but it is equally, if not more troubling to have whole legislatures of states meet as they did in Texas and as they did in North Carolina to pass laws designed to disenfranchise citizens of this country who are African American and Latino. That is also white supremacy and that predated Trump. And I worry that part of what we see now, which is so over the top, may steer us away from understanding that Trump was only possible because of the problem that lay underneath the surface. The truth is if Hillary Clinton had been elected, people would have believed we were on a steady march.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we filed the case and we win the case. The federal court finds that the law violated the Voting Rights Act and was passed for the purpose of discriminating against African Americans and Latinos. You know that the omnibus North Carolina voter suppression bill was struck down by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that said that with surgical precision”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Failure, I think, of this country to recognize the signs of what that meant. Know we challenge Texas' voter ID law. Texas had the strictest voter ID law in the country. It was a voter ID law that they had tried to get pre-cleared that had been denied before Shelby. The day of the Shelby County decision, the Attorney General of Texas tweeted out his intention to resuscitate that voter ID law. And he did. And this voter ID law kept our clients who were students at Prairie View A&M from using their university ID to vote, which they had been able to use in the past. Native Americans could no longer use their tribal ID to vote, all kinds of state employee ID were no longer eligible to use, but you could use a concealed gun carry permit.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But Chief Justice Robertson, a majority of the Supreme Court, decided in 2013 that time was up and that enough was enough and that this was stigmatizing to the South. It was an astonishing decision. The Voting Rights Act had been reauthorized time and time again by a bipartisan Congress. It had last been reauthorized in 2006. The vote was 98 to 0 in the Senate, 396 to 33 in the House. That's how bipartisan the Voting Rights Act, including Section 5, was. And the Congress held hearings and took in evidence and determined that it needed to be reauthorized that voting rights and voter suppression was still a problem. Supreme Court swept that away. And what we saw after that was the unleashing of a kind of new engagement with voter suppression. So this predated the Trump presidency and it's important, David, because as I have been saying, I'm really deeply concerned with the fact that”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Representative Bobby Scott says they needed the old fashioned way, they earned it, right? So they earned being under pre-clearance by that history.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before they could make them. And if those changes were seen to have the effect of undermining black voting strength, then they would not be allowed to move those changes forward.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm actually, I don't want to date myself, but I'm actually old enough to have sued Democrats who are, you know, still that final few who are governors in the South in voting rights cases. The docket that we had at the Legal Defense Fund and have at the Legal Defense Fund, many of those voting rights cases predated Trump. The Supreme Court's decision in 2013, Shelby County versus Holder, which essentially gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Required certain jurisdictions in the country, mostly in the South, to submit any voting changes they wanted to make to a federal authority, either the Attorney General or a federal district court in the District of Columbia.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know. On one hand, you couldn't have a greater contrast between President Obama and President Trump without question. But, you know, what I have always said is that those of us who are civil rights lawyers, we see the flaws in our democracy maybe before others do because we're engaged deeply with people who are living at the margin and that's how you can tell and assess the strength of a democracy is you assess it by seeing how is it working in the lives of people who are marginalized, people who are at the bottom. So it is important to say that much of the work I do was not created by President Trump. I just described being a voting rights lawyer years ago, right?”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Within the white community to not talk about the lynching of Matthew Williams and that people who've tried to violate it were ostracized. I mean, I tell the story in the book of a white woman who talked about it at a historical society event with her friends. And she was frozen out of that community and finally left because she dared to surface this story that there was a tacit agreement we will never talk about. So, all of that is the stuff that I think we haven't really explored.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those stories were told as they hit the target, right? Lynching was about social control. It was a form of racial terrorism. It was a way to control the population. And so these stories had power and resonance, but also the story about the complicity of ordinary white people It's also a story that gets passed down. I heard those stories. I heard those stories about who you can trust and who you can't trust. So to pretend that there's not residue of that, and in the white community there are stories that are passed down too. And many of those stories are about closing ranks. What I found in my research was that there was a pact.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was only when he got to high school he realized, gosh, I wasn't even born, right? But the stories were so passed down in the family because members of the black community would tell their children, this is why you have to follow the rules. This is why you get off the sidewalk when this person is coming. This is why you don't talk back.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's extraordinary, you know, swastikas on sheets. It was extraordinary. I don't know that there's been a local conversation deeply about that. And when I say conversation, I don't mean, you know, just a conversation that hits the surface. We may know the facts, although very often the facts are unknown. But what's the effect of that? These stories get passed down. And that's what I learned during this research on lynching. The people in the black community that I spoke to, there was one man who later became an elected official in Wycomico County. He could so vividly describe the lynching of Matthew Williams that happened in 1931. He assumed that he had been there.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reverend Barbara and I were just talking about when Dr. King came to Chicago and Cicero You know, in 1966. He didn't just see him, he felt him. I mean, they would brick rocks and bricks. And if you've seen the footage.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The community of prosecutors needs to talk about those prosecutors who had all the evidence but refused to prosecute the individuals who they knew were the lynchers. The religious community, the faith community. You know, I looked at the sermons that were preached the Sunday after the lynching in the white churches. They need to talk about their failure to engage in the moral issue of what happened often the Saturday night before in that town. There are conversations that need to happen within families. Some of these conversations are very intense and local and familial and the scale of them is not always best at the national level.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And confront that history and recognize that history. And I also think that conversations about race are not only at the community level, they're at the level of institutions that the law enforcement community in those communities needs to talk about what their response was.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we very often talk about wanting to have a national conversation on race and I'm not really excited about that idea. I think that race is a very difficult topic, very intense, but also very local. And these local pogroms that happen in these communities very often followed by looting or burning down of the black part of town and that kind of set the relationship between blacks and whites in those towns has to be explored because what I found when I was doing my research on cases that had nothing to do with lynching, on other civil rights cases, was that these communities were almost locked and frozen from those events into a certain kind of choreography of how they dealt with each other and that what overlaid that whole choreography was silence, the desire not to talk about this thing that happened. So I think those communities need to really themselves grapple with their own history.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there was, you know, I was trying to say it in the confines of litigation, but writing this book really freed me up to be able to tell these important stories about the history of lynching.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know so much more. There's been so much more scholarship and films and so forth about the Tulsa Race riots, but I included it in the complaint that I filed under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in the section called History of Discrimination, but I largely wrote those allegations on information and belief from the word of my clients because it was so hard to find documentation to actually support the events that they knew happened.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sanctioned by the community, known by law enforcement, known by prosecutors, known by judges With no accountability and that it's important to tell that story. And so this ultimately was yet another one of the stories that I wanted to be able to tell in my life as an academic. I could tell those stories. I remember I brought a voting rights case challenging the way judges are elected in Oklahoma. That was the first time I learned about the Tulsa race riots. So this is maybe 1991. This is before there was the big legislative commission and so forth. And it was almost like a kind of story that African Americans told, but it was very hard to find documentation that proved that it in fact happened. You couldn't find the newspaper from that week, the Tulsa World, and the public library was missing. Same thing I found actually on the eastern shore newspaper after the lynching, just for that week somehow was missing. You know, so you couldn't really prove that it happened. But it did happen. And now, of course,”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the eastern shore of Maryland, in all of those communities, there was this history that my clients would tell me about some history of racial violence, of some pogrom that happened in this community in decades past. And it was astonishing to me that wherever I went, these stories would come out. They might have happened 50 years ago, but they were very present in the understanding of African Americans about their relationship to the white community in those towns. And that story, those stories very much shaped that relationship. And part of what shaped that relationship is precisely what is indicated in the title of the book, that these events happened in the middle of town that everybody saw.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“YouTube. Okay. And so maybe you even share this with me. My understanding of lynching was that it was something that happened in the woods. With kind of very rural people. And that is not the truth And that truth is really important. It's important that most lynchings happened downtown, very often on the courthouse lawn, that the people who attended those lynchings were not people in the back woods, but they were law students and high school students and housekeepers and shop owners and pharmacists and just average people. And that truth was important. And the reason I wrote the book, you know, again, it kind of all comes out of the experience of engaging with communities as a civil rights lawyer was that every time I was doing a case, whether it was voting rights cases in the South or whether it was cases that I then took on at Maryland where I was running an environmental justice clinic,”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the book is called On the Courthouse Lawn Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century. And the reason I chose that title is because I'm a New Yorker born and raised.”
2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source