YouSaid · the spoken record

Sherrilyn Ifill

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84

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2019-01-17

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2019-01-17

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1. “And disenfranchisement, and what it means for the justice system to not reflect the communities of people who they have so much control over.”

   2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “And so that was the other impetus Is there a way that I can say more about what I heard and about what the truth is about race and representation and the justice system and the feeling of exclusion and what it means to not see yourself represented and what it means to feel as though the justice system does not reflect your community, your values and so forth And so when I went to teach at University of Maryland Law School I ended up writing for 10 years really about what I had heard. I wrote a succession of law review articles about this issue of diversity on the bench and what it really means.”

   2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “But there was something else. And the something else was that I was litigating those cases and I had a sense that I wasn't saying in the courtroom. Precisely what my clients were telling me was the reason, for example, that they wanted to elect African American judges. What was the reason? So yes, litigated the case. I litigated the case under the Voting Rights Act. We prevailed in the case. But there really wasn't a space to talk about this issue of what it meant to be represented on the bench. And I wanted to write about it.”

   2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Yes. So, good question Yeah, it's like even if I could have afforded it, I wouldn't have had a living nanny. I wanted to be with my children. And I'm certain that some of that. It's certainly related to having lost my mom and seeing how important that is. But I think my kids would say, so I left LDF. Part of it was I do want to be clear that I didn't leave LDF because I had kids and because I wanted a more balanced life alone. Was part of it. I'm a bit of a workaholic, so I knew I was going to be working crazy hard no matter what I did, and my kids would probably tell you that I worked all the time as an academic, which I did.”

   2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “You know, people have talked with me about that. How did you make the choice? There was no choice. There was no other way for me. That was why I went to law school. That's part of why I enjoyed law school. I knew why I was there. I didn't go to law school to be a lawyer. I went to law school to do the work that I ended up doing. And so I'm eternally grateful for that. But it actually helped me. I've always said I've never been unhappy in any job I've had, in any aspect of my career, because I've been doing exactly what I wanted to do. So I knew why I was there. And so the money was not important, but it was difficult to figure out how to do this balance.”

   2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “And the only one I could think of was Constance Baker Motley, who was now on the federal bench, but who had litigated most of the cases, desegregating public universities in the South. And so I actually did call her up. And to, you know, her credit, she was an extraordinary woman. She said, absolutely, come see me. So we had lunch. And I said, well, what do I do? And she said, Well, first of all, you need to live in Nanny. And I said, Well, I can't afford to live in Nanny and I don't want to live in Nanny. As I recall, my salary at the time was, I think I was making $25,000 a year. And so, you know, it was a bit of a struggle. But I didn't have a lot of role models to help me figure out that particular piece.”

   2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “And also very much in love with my daughter and my family. And after five years, you know, I said, how do I, how can I do this another way? But what's important to remember is that there weren't very many models for me of how to do it. I mean, I remember actually when I was pregnant, I talked to the then director counsel, who just a mentor who recently passed away, but one of the great civil rights lawyers literally of our time and unfortunately not enough people know about him, Julius Chambers. And I told him what I wanted to do. And he said, well, you should talk to some other woman at LDF who's had kids and litigated. And I said, well, who really, most women at LDF did not have small children.”

   2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Yeah, you know, I had a child, I guess I think I did my first trial when I was pregnant. I certainly remember that the first time I felt my baby kick, I was on a telephone deposition. I was conducting a deposition of an expert witness. And I remember also that I weaned my daughter so that I could go do my first appellate argument in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. And I always tell people I have no regrets about it either. At that point, we weren't so much into pumping. But I was very career focused.”

   2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Means so much to me because I started out with this important issue and the desire of African American voters in Harris County to be able to elect judicial candidates to office. And so to see decades later, this roster of African-American women, no less judges elected in Harris County is super powerful for me.”

   2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Houston area, and there'd been no African Americans who were elected. Some had been appointed to fill unexpired terms by the then Democratic governor Mark White, but they couldn't get elected. So I went down again, a little young and naive, but I started to really work on this case, and I ended up filing the case, and in three years the case ended up in the Supreme Court. So it was, you know, a meteoric rise. And it was extraordinarily rigorous. We won the case. The court decided that the elections for trial judges is covered by Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and that was important. And it's one of the reasons why, you know, that picture that has become viral in the last few months of the 17 African American women who were elected in Harris County in November, women judges who were elected.”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “I came to do voting rights work, and that's what I did almost exclusively for five years. And, you know, very early on, maybe the second week, the director council sent me to Houston to talk with African-American voters in Harris County, Texas, who believed that the at-large system of electing judges there denied them the ability to elect their candidates of choice to sit on the bench. Harris County was about 20% African American, 22% Latino. Houston.”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Another example of an extraordinary young lawyer, and look where he is now. It's one of the reasons why the roster of alumni at LDF is so extraordinary, because there's just people who go on to do amazing things.”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “But I was a very, very young lawyer. And so it was a place of extraordinary stress. You just wanted to do well. And one of the extraordinary things was that, you know, you would go to communities in the South where you represented your clients and they would have complete faith in you. So I'm like 26, right? But they are just very clear that you know what you're doing and that you're going to be great.”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “There. So, yeah, so I went to NYU Law School, which was great for me because NYU had really transformed itself in many ways into kind of the premier place for training public interest lawyers. And they had a roster of scholars on the faculty who were just extraordinary. So there are many people who can say that they did not like law school. I loved law school. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and felt that I was in the right place. And when I left law school, as you said, I went to the ACLU for a year as a fellow and then went to the legal defense fund. So I was a very, very young lawyer. And the legal defense fund, you know, I maintained for years afterwards after I left it was still the place where I was working with the smartest people I've ever met, a place of tremendous pressure because the work is so important and the relationship with clients is so important.”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Really powerfully affected me. And I knew that I wanted to be involved in some kind of civil rights or social justice work in some way.”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “High school years as well. That is not my goal today. But that was, you know, but because I saw Thurgood Marshall and I thought, well, okay, I could be the female counterpart to Thurgood Marshall. So there was a sense that these images and these people and what they were doing, the substance of them.”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “No pressure, no pressure at all. He's the founder of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Was the first African American Supreme Court justice. And so I fairly young decided I wanted to be a civil rights lawyer. And actually, it's funny there was a lot of talk about yearbooks, about high school yearbooks during the Kavanaugh hearing. So I pulled up my high school yearbook. And what I said, you know, in my career goal, it says first black female Supreme Court justice. That's what I said I wanted to be. Did you go back?”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “And then later getting to see these documentaries, I did get to see lawyers. I did get to see Thurgood Marshall. And so, yeah, when I was...”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “So 1968 was really heavy for me. And so there was a sense of my connection to this period of time. And so what I thought when I saw these films was I just couldn't believe I had missed this period. It was so obvious I was supposed to be in the civil rights movement. So I think my first feelings was that sense of wanting to be part of that.”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Know I've said before that I was mentioning that we watched all these civil rights documentaries when I was a kid, and I would watch these documentaries, and there was one that used to come on every year. It was called King from Montgomery to Memphis. And never got tired of watching it and it ended with Nina Simone singing Why, the King of Love is Dead and that walk with the casket. And so it's super, super powerful for a young kid. And also, you know, 1968, when King was assassinated, it was a year that I can remember as a kid being very powerful because I do actually remember, I think I remember at least the feeling and the funeral, and I certainly remember the feeling around Bobby Kennedy being killed. And I only remember all those things. Because the last month of that year was the year was the month my mother died”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Who ran for president in 1972 from New York, from Brooklyn, there were these women who were serious, they were about business and who were in politics.”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “She was an imposing figure, but she controlled that room when she spoke. You couldn't not listen. Yes, very elegant and very. And so for me, that opened up a new possibility. The black women I saw on television were extraordinary, but mostly they were entertainers. It was Diane Carroll. But there was a period when I was young and I was blessed to be in that period when there was Barbara Jordan, when there was Ivan Brathwaite Burke from California, I remember, when there was Shirley Chisholm.”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “She had She had a voice. That's the only way I can describe it. I always say that there was a, it was maybe the first time I had seen certainly on television, you know, a black woman command the room with her voice. Not an entertainer, right? Not command the room because she was singing. I always say, you know, Barbara Jordan was not a decorative woman. You know, I would call her a handsome woman, right?”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “But in those days, you only had a few channels and it was on every channel. And you couldn't get away from it. It was the summertime, I remember. You know, big family, not at all wealthy, struggling. We didn't go to camp. We stayed home, you know, the summer. We just hung out. So we hung out. And, you know, and it was just boring. But you watched it because it was the only thing that was on. And then I can remember it. Suddenly it wasn't boring. I mean, I just remember that feeling of suddenly something was happening that was different than what had seemed like a bunch of people droning on and on. And part of that was, you know, the shift I remember when John Dean came to testify and his wife, Maureen, came in. So there was a little glamour in the room. And I remember Barbara Jordan. Was extraordinary”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “And he was very, you know, I think the term would be that he was a race man. He was really into the idea of African Americans moving forward and having power and finding themselves. And so we were true students of the civil rights movement. There was no documentary that came on about the civil rights movement that we didn't watch. And, you know, my father would call you downstairs. I'm giving up my age. But, you know, old enough that when I was very young, you'd get called downstairs if black political leaders were on TV. And so there was a kind of sense in which he wanted to infuse that in us. And so for us, that was just kind of part of our home. And we came to like it. I didn't like the Watergate hearings at first.”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “He was a news junkie. I mean, I've known many other news junkies. I don't think that's particular to being an immigrant. Yeah. And so, you know, I think that was his thing. He enjoyed it.”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Yeah, so we were the kind of family that thought politics was fun. We watched the news every night with my father and we watched Firing Line and we watched a lot of the political shows that were led by African Americans like Gil Noble's like it is every weekend. And we had a conversation with the television. We watched the news and my father was talking to the TV. There was a running critique happening. So we never thought you were supposed to just consume the news. We were really engaged with it.”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Notoriously. And so that work allowed him to, you know, work in the union, to purchase his own home. And it was he, my brother, who signed the promissory note for my student loans when I went to Vassar College. So there's a way in which your whole family is involved in supporting you.”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Yeah, and in some ways, you know, I say all the time that I always want to make my family proud and particularly my siblings who I think, like many siblings in big families, are kind of a part of making you what you are. And I talk about this a lot because I think we've lost some of this in America by having lost our kind of value of public goods and public life. You know, my older siblings contributed to me being who I am. My sister and brother went to City College in New York and I remember that the registration fee was $85 a semester and very often we didn't have it. And they were late registering, but they were able to get through college. My oldest brother was able to join the local electrical union because of the work of breaking down discrimination in those unions. And it was my brother who was able to sign the...”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Well, you know, I have a big family, so I have nine siblings, and part of the processing is that, is that, you know, you're surrounded by your family and you're watching how they process.”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Absolutely, absolutely. And my father started out as an electrician and then became a social worker in Harlem. And we grew up in Queens. My mom passed away when I was very young. Almost”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “So much of what people think about in terms of the American South was also kind of the understanding of American segregation very uniquely in the country of Panama. And so it really helped me understand the ways in which we make assumptions about the immigration story and about the ways in which the immigration story is somehow very separate from America. But in our case, it really wasn't. And then for my parents and for our family, we grew up in New York.”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “But tell me about your family. So for our family, our family comes really from two strains from the Caribbean, from Barbados, which is where my grandparents are from, but also from Panama, because my grandparents traveled like many black people who lived in Jamaica and Barbados and other islands did to Panama to work on the Panama Canal or to work on the jobs that were created by this extraordinary infrastructure project. And as a result of my grandparents being in Panama, we have a kind of unique perspective on America because Panama at that time was in many ways a kind of wholly owned subsidiary of the United States. And so in Panama, there was segregation in the canal zone that was controlled by the United States. My grandmother was a domestic who worked for white families in the canal zone.”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Well, it's one of the reasons why I'm so interested in how we talk about what makes an American and who Americans are. Last year was the 150th anniversary of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. You know, one of the three amendments passed after the Civil War. And I think people forget that the 14th Amendment contains so many of the provisions that I think we almost accept as heir. One of them is birthright citizenship, right? The idea that if you were born in this country, you are a citizen of this country. And that provision literally shaped the landscape, the vision of this country for the following subsequent century. And so families across the country, including my own, are families that were shaped by the immigrant story. Most white families in this country were shaped by the immigrant story.”

    2019-01-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 300 - Sherrilyn Ifill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source