Ep. 31 – The Future of Criminal Justice Reform and Voting Rights: A Conversation Sherrilyn Ifill

[0:00:07 Peniel] Welcome to Race and Democracy, a podcast on the intersection between race, democracy, public policy, social justice and citizenship. On today’s show, we are very pleased to welcome an extraordinary guest, an activist and scholar, Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the nation’s premier civil rights law organization fighting for Racial Justice and Equality. The LDA was founded in 1940 by the legendary civil rights lawyer and later Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and became a separate organization from the NAACP in 1957. The lawyers at the Legal Defense Fund developed and executed the legal strategy that led to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education, widely regarded as the most transformative and monumental legal decision of the 20th century. Sherrilyn Ifill is the second woman to lead the organization. She’s also a astounding scholar. One of her books is Confront is on the courthouse lawn, confronting the legacy of lynching in the 21st century, which just came out with a new addition and a forward by Bryan Stevenson, the author of Just Mercy. And another one is A Perilous Path Talking Race Inequality in the Law, which is a conversation between Sherrilyn Ifill, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Bryan Stevenson and Anthony C. Thompson. So, Sherrilyn Ifill, welcome to race.

[0:01:47 Sherrilyn] Thank you. Thank you for having me.

[0:01:49 Peniel] You do such extraordinary work. And this is 20/20. This is such an extraordinary time. I want to have a discussion with you about voting rights and criminal justice reform and the work that the LDF is doing that you’re doing in the context of voting rights in 2020, especially this landscape that is post Shelby v. Holder, but also a landscape that is post the Obama Department of Justice. You had this great conversation with Loretta Lynch and certainly Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder were back-to-back, not just African-American attorney generals, but really back to back attorney generals who I think believed in the law vis-a-vis, the Voting Rights Act and sort of black citizenship rights for all African-Americans, irrespective of race, class, gender. So I want to talk about what has changed. What is the LDF trying to do right now in 2020? We’re heading towards national elections in November to try to ensure in this post Shelby universe that voting rights are going to be guaranteed.

[0:02:58 Sherrilyn] Yeah, it is a challenging time. I mean, for those who don’t know the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County vs. Holder, it was a case that we were partisan or represented parties in. And the case essentially wound up in the Supreme Court. And the court, in a decision by Chief Justice Roberts, said that we no longer needed the provisions of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. It’s largely regarded as the most effective, successful civil rights tool in any civil rights statute that was passed during that that heyday period.

[0:03:36 Peniel] And why is that?

[0:03:37 Sherrilyn] Because Section 5 put a requirement on jurisdictions that want to make voting changes, that if they want to make those changes, they would have to first get permission, have it pre-cleared by either the attorney general, the United States Department of Justice or a federal district court judge and the jurisdictions-

[0:03:58 Peniel] That seems like a really high bar.

[0:04:00 Sherrilyn]Well, the good news about it is the point of it was to not require individuals or the Justice Department to have to sue every time some discriminatory voting change was made. And actually, if you look at the legislative history of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Senate report, what the Senate says is that it’s trying to get at not only contemporaneous discrimination, voting discrimination, but what they called ingenious methods that might be developed in the future. So Congress understood that vote suppression is a is a shapeshifter. They understood that they would not be able to anticipate all of the ways in which whites would attempt to hold onto power through voting. And so therefore, they said, you know, if you if you want to make any change, if you first send it to the attorney general and the attorney general’s assessment is whether or not the change will have a negative effect on African-American voting strength or power.

[0:04:55 Peniel] And let me ask you something because, you’re you’re a lawyer, law professor, a legal expert. Why wasn’t the original VRA? Why weren’t all the states under the VRA? Because I know right now there’s legislation proposed in Congress to have a new voting rights act where all the states would be under the jurisdiction of the Voting Rights Act.

[0:05:17 Sherrilyn] Sure. So you remember what the conditions were. 1965 that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. You remember the Selma to Montgomery march.

[0:05:24 Peniel] Absolutely.

[0:05:25 Sherrilyn] The issue that we were confronting as as a people at that moment was the refusal of mostly an almost exclusively southern jurisdictions who were denying African-Americans the ability to register in some instances to vote in others through a very various means. Poll tax literacy tests, understanding clause, violence, intimidation and so forth. So the target really was at where the problem was and what the the framers of the Voting Rights Act, it was they created a coverage formula. And so they looked at a series of factors. You know, African-American registration, turnout, participation and election in the 1964 elections. That was the formula. And if you fell under that formula, if that formula produced the results that kind of triggered the coverage of Section 5, then you were under it. And it actually turned out not to be exclusively southern states because, of course, the Voting Rights Act was also amended to include language, minority provisions-

[0:06:29 Peniel] As Barbara Jordan. We’re here in the great state of Texas 1975-

[0:06:31 Sherrilyn] That’s exactly right. And so that’s the whole state of Texas was covered. But also people forget three boroughs of New York City were covered, US counties in California and other places throughout the country. So it turned out not to be entirely the south, but but was meant to address what what had been. A very regional problem, and I will say that when the act was reauthorized, it’s been reauthorized a number of times and always challenged. The last reauthorization was in 2006 and Congress held hearings over the course of a year. Witness testimony, 90 witnesses, 15000 pages of testimony to determine whether it was still necessary. Right. And whether that formula and the states that were included under it still was the appropriate way to determine who should be covered. And the overwhelming conclusion of a bipartisan Congress was, was that you needed it more than ever. In fact, many of the members of Congress expressed surprise at what they found in those hearings. They thought that the evidence would show that things were better than it was. And so Congress voted in the House. I think it was 396 to 33 that they reauthorized the Voting Rights Act in 2006. And in the Senate, it was 98 to 0. So overwhelmingly bipartisan reauthorization in 2006. And yet when it gets to Chief Justice Roberts in the Supreme Court in 2013, they make the decision, contrary to that evidence that’s in the record kind of on their feeling that the South has changed. That this is a way of branding and punishing the south. And therefore, we don’t need Section 5 anymore. And the result of that has been two things. One. Exactly what we predicted that the southern states were true to form. The attorney general of Texas right after the decision was announced. Hours later tweeted his intention of re-upping the state’s voter I.D. law that they had not been able to implement because of Section 5, that he was now going to try and impose that voter I.D. law, the most stringent voter I.D. law passed in the country, which LGF and many other civil rights organizations challenged and had to be changed.

[0:08:49 Peniel] And I know, I’ve read where you said that the Texas voter I.D. law disenfranchises 600,000 voters.

[0:08:55 Sherrilyn] Oh, yeah, we proved it at trial. I mean, and and this was a you know, we challenged the law not only because of its effect, but also because of its intent. You know, the meticulous way in which the forms of I.D. that would satisfy the requirements of the law for purposes of voting were very racially skewed. Right. So you couldn’t use you know, our clients, students at Prairie View A&M could no longer use their state university I.D. You couldn’t use your tribal I.D., but you could use a concealed gun carry permit. Right. So so when when Texas tried to impose this law while Section 5 was still in force, naturally, the attorney general said, no, you can’t. But now that the Supreme Court cited the Shelby decision, they imposed that law, we had to try that case. So here’s the perfect example of why Section 5 not only was helpful for for, you know, African-Americans and Latinos and others, civil rights activists, but also for the states. I mean, so we went through how many years of litigation we sued in 2014 and the case wasn’t resolved until 2017 or 2018. But for the price of a stamp. Under Section 5, a jurisdiction like Texas would simply submit their plan to impose this I.D. law. The attorney general would review it, would get gather information from other sources and would make a decision for the cost of that postage stamp. But instead, now Texas had to litigate for four years for us to simply prove what we knew at the beginning, which was that the effect of the voter I.D. law would be racially discriminatory. So that’s the loss of Section 5. So that’s one thing that the states returned. I mean, you saw it in North Carolina, had an I.D. law as well.

[0:10:34 Peniel] What was the final disposition of the Texas case?

[0:10:36 Sherrilyn] We won that trial 94 page decision finding that the law, what was described was intentionally discriminatory and violated the Voting Rights Act. We went up to the 5th Circuit. They affirmed the finding that it violated the Voting Rights Act, sent it back down on intentional discrimination. The trial judge again found that it was intentionally discriminatory, went back up to the court of appeals. And by then we were in negotiations to resolve the litigation with the changes that now exist in Texas that have amelioratedthe harshest effects of that law. But you look-

[0:11:03 Peniel] What are some of those changes that happened?

[0:11:06 Sherrilyn] Essentially, it almost looks like South Carolina, where you can make a declaration for why you don’t have the I.D. so that you can be freed up. Of course, you know, making that declaration is a is a sworn statement. But but ways that you can get out of having to meet what had been the stringent requirements of the southern-

[0:11:24 Peniel] So there’s some mitigation?

[0:11:25 Sherrilyn] So there’s mitigation. You know, in North Carolina, they passed an omnibus voter suppression law that included I.D. But also included, you know, ending a curriculum that, you know, taught 16 year olds about voting. I mean, it was it was just an insane law. And the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the North Carolina law was created with surgical precision. Right. To target African-American voters. So that’s that. So that first thing that happened after Shelby was that a return to precisely what Congress knew in 1965 would happen, which would be the ingenious methods of southern jurisdictions seeking to engage in voter suppression.

[0:12:05 Peniel] So certainly the LDF. And you you’ve had, at least during the second term of the Obama administration, at least a partner who is trying to stave some of this off, even as the Supreme Court had made the decision, it seems like the Lynch and Holder DOJ was trying to partner. Now, since January 20th of 2017, there’s been a new administration. And so where are we right now with the work you’re doing especially? I know you’re going to be going to Selma soon. It’s going to be the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery. Demonstrations in this August 6 is gonna be the fifty fifth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act that was signed into legislation by Lyndon Johnson. So where are we at now with this 2020 election? Both. You know, when you think about federal, state, local protections for four people.

[0:12:56 Sherrilyn] So actually, the Texas voter I.D. case in brief is the best example of what that change looks like the day of the Shelby County decision. Obviously, you know, devastating decision. Attorney General then Eric Holder called a meeting at his office and civil rights litigators went to his office to meet with the attorney general about. Now, what are we gonna do? And he pledged then to make sure that the resources of the Department of Justice would be available and ready to use to challenge voter suppression and in fact, the Department of Justice. That was one of the one of the challengers to the Texas voter I.D. law. So that’s the perfect example. But what makes it even better is that I told you that we went up on appeal on the Texas voter I.D. law. And while we were on our way to oral argument before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, we learned that the attorney now Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, would no longer stand by the position that the Department of Justice had adopted from the beginning of the litigation, that the law was passed with the purpose and intent of discriminating against African-American voters. So immediately you had a switch and that was maybe, I want to say, February or March of 2017. So immediately the Department of Justice essentially switch switched sides. And what we’ve seen since then is a complete absence of a voting rights docket at the Department of Justice. And it’s important for people to understand the civil rights division of the Department of Justice is it was created within that crucible to try and really take a leadership role in enforcing the nation’s civil rights laws. And it has been entirely abdicated in the voting space since January 2017. What we decided was that we would have to become a private DOJ, that we would have to shift our focus and marshal our resources to be able to do the work that the Department of Justice would no longer do.

[0:14:45 Peniel] So what some of the work that that is-

[0:14:47 Sherrilyn] That means increasing our litigation, focusing really on local jurisdictions, which we do a lot of that work at the local level because it’s the work that kind of stays under the radar. There are always lots of folks who want to challenge state I.D. laws and state redistricting. But we bring a lot of cases in small towns in Alabama for the county commission elections, school board elections and so forth. We realized that we would have to marshal additional resources to actually do election protection work. And so as we go into the season of primaries next week and the general this year, we take very seriously elections. We we. Our mantra is that there are elections every year. So we’re not on a four year cycle, on a two year cycle. And we are physically at the polls in eight states on Election Day.

[0:15:32 Peniel] And why is that? For our listeners, why is that so important? Because I don’t know if everyone knows that part of the VRA was providing voter registrar folks who would go in and sort of monitor and monitor elections. And we usually think about monitoring elections is happening in other countries, not in the you know.

[0:15:50 Sherrilyn] No, no. You need people at the polls. I think people don’t know that voter suppression happens on election day. I think people think of voter suppression as being the I.D. laws and gerrymandering and moving polling places and so forth. And that is part of it. But a lot of it is what you see happen on election day at the polls. You know what happens when people who have registered and we’re in good standing suddenly show up at the polls and find they’re on an inactive list? You know, I’ve had the experience of doing poll watching in Alabama. You know, older African-American couple husband-wife go into the polls. They’ve been living in the same place for 25 years. They come out. She was able to vote. He wasn’t able to vote. Or he says, yes, I voted. But, you know, it was fine because it was provisional. Right. People don’t know that provisional votes are not counted. Right. Unless that’s why it’s provisional. The provision is that you come back to the board of Elections later that week with proof of why you should have been able to vote right at that polling place. So, helping people understand the need to try and vote by regular ballot and knowing when when they are able to vote by regular ballot. So knowing that in the different jurisdictions and states and being there and available, those polling place changes that do happen, is it that that morning people pulling up to a polling place and there’s nobody there and there’s a makeshift sign that says, no, the polling places now. You know, several blocks away.

[0:17:05 Peniel] And certainly we saw some of these irregularities in 2018. Absolutely. Especially in Georgia. In the case of Stacey Abrams, you did. Who is running to be the first African-American.

[0:17: 13 Sherrilyn] You had, Gwinnett County where they didn’t have the plugs to plug in the machines and people went online for four hours. You had Richland County, South Carolina, where machines were changing the votes from Republican to Democrat. And and to be frank, the county officials were very appreciative of our help when we could tell them the polling places where this was happening. Finding out that there were too few technicians to fix machines that had to be calibrated. I mean, this is really the fine work, right? Of of of election protection, making sure that there are enough machines in a polling place. You know, you have the long lines because of the failure of county officials to do the proper study and allocation of how many machines are likely to be needed in a particular polling place, which should involve thinking about, you know, how many students enrolled there this year. Did a new housing development open and so forth. So we need to be there. And so we decided that we would have to increase our forces, that we would have to train volunteers, that we would have to link arms with our partners who are all part of the civil rights hotline, 8 6, 6 hour vote.

[0:18:15 Peniel] And does this voter suppression really impact African-American and LatinX communities more than other communities. When you think about voter suppression, that’s happening post Shelby. And if so, why? Why? Why is it? Is it? Because I want us to because we know-

[0:18:30 Sherrilyn] Boy you really want to do A-B-C of this huh?

[0:18:32 Peniel] Yeah, yeah because I understand that there’s this level of voters. But why so surgical especially? You talked about Prairie View, A&M and African-America, historically African-American colleges. There were reports when Andrew Guilherme was running for governor in Florida that HBCU use and Florida were being suppressed.

[0:18:52 Sherrilyn] Well, you you’ll remember there was a special Senate election in Mississippi also in 2018. Mike, S.P. was running. Yes. And the incumbent senator was caught on a hot mike saying something like maybe there’s some colleges where we don’t want people to vote. And just that statement was enough to send us out. The election was just being held a few weeks later to an end to do our election protection work at HBC use all over Mississippi because of that concern. Prairie View A&M has had consistent problems. This was one where an instance in 2018 where we had to sue during early voting because the early voting assigned to Prairie View was not the same as the early voting time assigned to other other stations and polling polling sites in the county. So we had to sue Waller County yet again. I guess the question you’re asking is, is racial voter suppression real? And the answer is yes. And I know that it’s not a new phenomenon. It is not since 2017 during the Obama administration, we had a full docket of cases as well. We had a full docket of cases before the Shelby County decision. I came to l_d_a_ office, a voting rights lawyer, in 1988. So this has been an ongoing problem. It’s the reason why the law has continued to be reauthorized. And it’s about power. It’s about white supremacy.

[0:20:14 Peniel] And I guess one of reasons why I’m asking is, Sherrilyn, when we think about the heroic period, the civil rights movement, which the n.w.a’s S.P. legal defense comes out. We have a national narrative that we won after these acts were passed, the Civil Rights Act. Brown, the Voting Rights Act, even the Fair Housing Act. And so I think it really the work you’re doing, a lot of people are unaware at the granular level and maybe Shelby Post Shelby has made people that’s more concerned, but people thought we won this. Like people people have. It’s hard to imagine that people are trying to actively suppress the voting rights of black American citizens, maybe prisoners, maybe people who are in quotes, bad people, but not citizens. And that’s why-

[0:20:59 Sherrilyn] You know it’s so interesting that you’re saying that, because that’s one of the reasons why I refer to civil rights workers as kind of democracy maintenance worker. We’re like the canary in the coal mine where the early warning system, a lot of what we’re seeing right now, frankly, that people are willing to believe now is exactly what we were saying. It was happening right when when Barack Obama was president. People thought, well, you have a black president, you have a black attorney general. It’s all good thing. And as I said, we had no absence of work. I remind people that, you know, the most heart wrenching videos of unarmed African-Americans being killed by the police happened during the Obama administration or people saw during the Obama administration. And this is work that we’ve been engaged in for decades.

[0:21:48 Peniel] And I want to. With you saying that, Sherrilyn. I want to pivot the conversation because I want to talk about stop and frisk and criminal justice.

[0:21:55 Sherrilyn] Can I say one other thing about voting, though, before you switch? I had said that the first result of Shelby was that many southern jurisdictions reverted to form just as Congress knew they would. Yes. But what I want to say is that the cause you asked why? Why was that national? The effect of the Shelby decision has been actually to metastasize the voting suppression that used to exist primarily in the south. So then you saw voter I.D. laws in Wisconsin and you saw move polling places outside Dodge City, Kansas, because it emboldened it emboldened opponents. Now, they saw all this is a way of holding on to power or wielding power that no longer will have the in premature right of being illegal activity or disfavored activity because of in section under Section 5, it would have been immediately recognized. Right. So the effect of the Shelby decision was not only to have southern jurisdictions revert to form, but actually to nationalize what had largely been a regional problem. And so now you see voter suppression happening all over the country. You saw North North Dakota require. Yes, you know, everyone to now have a street address, even knowing that their Native American population, in many instances living on the reservation does not have a street address. You began to see this happen in places where we had not seen it before. So part of the consciousness of what people are seeing now is that this thing that had been limited in scope. Now the south is a big swath of the United States. So I don’t say it was a small problem. But I do want to say that the decision has not only just reverted us back to a place that we were before. It’s taking us to a new place in which voter suppression is now something that is available and utilized in jurisdictions all over the country.

[0:23:44 Peniel] I want to talk about this within the context of the 2020 election and criminal justice reform, because stop and frisk and NAACP Legal Defense Fund has done great work. LGF been one of the representing litigants. I’m from New York City, born and raised. And stop and frisk is really something that truthfully, New York City that I grew up in in the 70s and 80s, more police violence against African-Americans. On one level, it was the status quo. And I remember ELEANOR Bumpers and there’s a video going around of Audre Lorde talking about ELEANOR Bumpers. I remember that growing up in the city. I remember Michael Griffith in Howard Beach in 1986. And I was a freshman in high school at the time. Michael Stewart, Michael Stewart, you know, Yusef Hawkins, I remember all this, but certainly under David Dinkins with the Safe City Safe Streets Act and then under mayor. Giuliani, you started to get this broken windows policing and broken windows was really under both Democratic and Republican administrations and then under Michael Bloomberg from 2002 to 2014, 12 years as mayor, you saw extraordinary numbers of black and Latin ex young people stopped in terms of stop and frisk all the way until there was litigation that put it into this. And right now, Michael Bloomberg is one of the people running for president. And certainly his record has been utilized and deployed by critics against him. But I want to talk about stop and frisk and the way in which the criminal justice system and the demonization of black and brown bodies has also been connected to voter suppression. And there’s sort of a feedback loop where what I mean by that is the idea of everything from felon disenfranchisement to what we think about the Clinton crime bill and the criminalization of welfare and the poor and the welfare reform bill to where you have black and brown folks who are being locked up a lot of times not regaining access to citizenship. But but now and this is the interesting irony of this in the age of Black Lives Matter, having a constituency of people who are who are forcing this into the spotlight. This happened to Hillary Clinton in 2016 as well, where she had to answer for superpredator. And right now, Bloomberg and others are answering for their criminal justice, their past criminal justice policies. So what is the LDA doing vis-a-vis the criminal justice reform? Obviously, there’s a first step act that was passed in twenty nineteen. Many don’t think that it’s gone far enough. But I want to talk about criminal justice.

[0:26:29 Sherrilyn ] Well, that’s a lot. You know, and in many ways criminal justice. So first of all, for LGF, criminal justice work and voting rights work are really two of the kind of central pillars of the work we do. And we add to that education and then economic justice. You’re right to suggest that, you know, there is a connection between criminal justice and voting rights because it really is about citizenship. Yes. It’s about who gets to be a full and first class citizenship. Now, these these questions were supposed to be put to rest by the 13th, 14^th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, the civil war amendments. One was supposed to end slavery. The second was supposed to ensure that African-Americans were citizens of birthright citizenship, one birthright citizenship and entitled to equal protection of the law. Any anyone who is within the physical jurisdiction of the United States entitled to equal protection of the laws and due process so that the laws could not be used arbitrarily against you. And then the 15th Amendment that you cannot be denied the right to vote based on your race. So that should have resolved it. It was quickly apparent that that did not resolve it. Right. And we need additional civil rights statutes and so forth. But a key tool that really is part of what has been carried over from slavery is a narrative about about black people that allows you to create a criminal justice structure that holds them in a position of second class, at least a considerable number in a position of second class citizenship. And that narrative is about black criminality, about the fear of blacks, about black intelligence, about the refinement of the spirit of black people and so forth. And those narratives are strong and powerful. And once you have those narratives embedded in public policy and in the thinking of public policy makers, it becomes easy then to make laws that are deeply punitive in ways that deny the humanity of black people. And you know this, of course, that, you know, at the turn of the 20th century, many southern states redid their their state constitutions. And in those state constitutions were the kinds of provisions that we find ourselves living with today. You know, disenfranchising formerly incarcerated people, creating criminal statutes for very minor infractions, infractions that they thought black people were more likely to run afoul of. Given our position at that time and so embedded in the law was really an embrace of these narratives and stereotypes about who black people really are in America. And so to that extent, the idea of second class citizenship is deeply embedded. You know, if we think about how we express what is the common expression of citizenship in this country for Americans, it’s the vote know how can we all express ourselves as citizens while some people will march and some people can protest and some people can run for office? Right. But the theory is that if you are a citizen and you are of age, that you can vote yes. That’s our common means of expressing that. And so the denial of that means have expressed whether through voter suppression or through laws, laws that disenfranchise formerly incarcerated. Persons are always of sending that same message of second class citizenship status. And so the fight against it really is not only not only a fight against those individual things, against overcriminalization and mass incarceration and against voter suppression, but also a fight for. The realization of first class citizenship. Yes. To which we are entitled by the Constitution.

[0:30:08 Peniel] And when I talk to you about when whether we’re thinking about the Obama administration, which was obviously more positive for this current administration, this idea of race, democracy, citizenship. How come we don’t see the kind of embrace of just that concept? I think in policy, in the same manner that we saw during the harrowing period, the civil rights movement. Meaning about what you mean. We’ve got 2.3 million people in prison. We’ve seen all the video and the evidence of black folks, including children getting shot, Tamir Rice, Charyn gains. And we haven’t really seen that. We’ve seen a movement for black lives. But in terms of in a policy, in a transformative policy way, we haven’t seen it line up and correlate with the with the catastrophe that is the present and at least some legislation that we would say, hey, there was a reason why King and other people were backing the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. We knew we had this this massive problem, but we said these things. We’re going to at least ameliorate it. And I don’t see the one to one here.

[0:31:15 Sherrilyn] Yeah, but there isn’t a one to one. I think we should be really careful about making comparisons to the civil rights movement because the conditions are actually quite different in ways that are super, super alarming, especially since 2017. So first of all, the best and the most important and lasting civil rights progress happens, in my view, as a civil rights lawyer when lawyers and movements are happening at the same time. Right. So that we had that in the civil rights movement. And actually the lawyers were out ahead because there was the legal strategy leading up to Brown, which it was being executed over the course of 20 years and resulted in Brown in 1954. And the relationship between what people saw out of Brown and how people interpreted brown actually had a very powerful effect on someone like Rosa Parks and on others who engaged in that really early civil disobedience that began some of those movements. So that’s 1956 that we have then the Montgomery bus boycott. We don’t get to the Voting Rights Act until 1965. So between Brown and the Voting Rights Act is 10 years. Yes. And so you have 10 years of movement. Yeah, man, you have massive demonstrations, deaths, martyrships. Yeah. Uprise, food uprisings. You have things that happen in between. You have the creation of the civil rights division of the Justice Department from the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Right. And so you have movement that’s happening. You have a president who is reluctant and has to be pushed. John F. Kennedy into embracing civil rights. And then you have a president, LBJ, who does embrace civil rights immediately thereafter. And so those are all the conditions you have to kind of acknowledge our present in the civil rights movement. Compare it to today. OK. We actually don’t have those conditions. We actually do have movement happening. Right? Massive movement, Massimo. So you have. So you have post-Ferguson, you have you have Parkland, you have the women’s march. You have there is. And so that’s what’s exciting. Yeah. This movement for black lives. Movement for black lives. And feel that you feel the the the energy coming from from from the grassroots. But we have essentially what is an aborted process. Right. You’ve got Obama, who’s president, who’s actually doing some things, are trying to do some things.

[0:33:24 Peniel] What do you think about that presidency in terms of not the person, but the administration vis-a-vis criminal justice?

[0:33:31 Sherrilyn] I mean, let me come back to that for them. But but whatever are the nascent moves that are happening? Yes. Aborted. Right. By. By the election of Trump. Because the the movements that begin to really develop don’t really have until Obama’s second term. Yes. Everybody’s real dreamy, the first term. So for the second term, you have Republicans in Congress who are very serious that they’re not let anything happen. Right. He loses the House in that first midterm. So the conditions are no longer you have an increasingly conservative Supreme Court that begins to happen certainly after he leaves. You have the election of Trump. So you have a real shutdown of what is the what could have been the beginning of the top to meet the bottom. Yes. Right. To be the kind of transformation that you’re talking about happen. That said, I don’t think we should adhere to the idea that no changes did happen and are not happening because they are they’re just being driven at a different level than they would have been if we had a federal administration that was more open to it, which is a tremendous loss because change happens. It can happen in a much more widespread way when the federal government is on board. So let’s take policing reform. We have the protests around Mike Brown being killed. And now for the for the first time that I can remember. Then the nation’s attention is on an issue that has plagued the African-American community for decades. You talk about Queens. We’re both from Queens. My first even understanding of who the police are is when I’m 10 years old and everyone’s talking about a police officer killing a young man. And I remember it on the front page of the Daily News and so forth. And it was a big deal because the person who was killed was also 10. So I was 10 and he was 10. And that was Clifford Glover. Right. So, you know, we all need to get into how old I am now, but decided just to take it back. To show how long. Even in my lifetime, this has been real. And and in that instance, also, when Officer Shea was acquitted, because he was actually he was so egregious, he was actually tried. And when he was acquitted, there was an uprising in Queens and fires and people turned over cars. People just don’t have this memory anymore that this actually happened. So so an issue that’s been percolating for decades is getting the attention. You have the Department of Justice that does twice as many pattern and practice investigations of police departments as they had done in the prior administrations.

[0:35:37 Peniel] And this the Obama administration.

[0:35:38 Sherrilyn] So they’re in Baltimore and you know, they’re in Camden and they’re new in there in all these places.

[036:03 Peniel] And I’ve read the DOJ report on Baltimore and Ferguson. And it’s an extraordinary but I want it with with the with the time that we that we have left. I want to ask, what about next steps? What are we doing both in 2020? But the next five, 10 years, irrespective of who wins at the federal level?

[0:36:22 Sherrilyn] That’s the point. And I guess for us, the shift, the strategic shift. We knew that we would not have the support of the Department of Justice when we knew that President Trump intended to appoint Jeff Sessions, because we knew Jeff Sessions from our work in Alabama, from his time as the U.S. attorney in Alabama decades ago. So we knew that we knew he didn’t believe in consent decrees and so forth. And so we really devolved a lot of our work to the local level. We put more resources into our policing reform campaign that, you know, does work in Baltimore, trying to monitor the consent decree that narrowly made it through, despite the new administration’s efforts to try to scuttle it. We have the ongoing monitoring of the consent decree and the stop and frisk case in New York, which people should know that’s still going on. And we try to do policing reform work that tries to make that transformation happen at the local level, that tries to keep that energy alive, that tries to keep a sense of alarm among influencers that this is an important issue. The move of many around pushing for progressive prosecutors and so forth came out of this. So there’s a lot that has just that came out of that that is actually still happening. Every year there are bills that are focused on trying to address police use of misuse of force, you know, slowing down body worn cameras, challenging facial recognition technology, challenging the New York City gang database. There’s a case on the Chicago gang database. I mean, there’s a lot happening in the country. It’s just not happening at the federal level. Right. And so the first thing is, if you don’t have the feds, you don’t stop working. You devolve to the local and you push. So that’s number one of what happens 2020. The same is true for voting. To be frank, we don’t have the Department of Justice, so we will have the largest force we’ve ever had on the ground on election days.

[0:38:15 Peneil] How many people is that going to be?

[0:38:17 Sherrilyn] Well, it all depends on how many we count, how many volunteers we can train in the period of time. It’ll be fewer for the primary election, but it’ll be several hundred people who are out on election day. It’s making sure we have all of the information that we have our own system of finding out about voting changes. So we’re launching a voter defender project. We’ll have an app that’s available this summer so the community can immediately give that information.

[0:38:41 Peneil] How can people get involved? Is it through that app? How how can you get in there?

[0:38:44 Sherrilyn] The Apple launch and the app will launch in June. But even before then, you can always reach out to the legal defense fund. We really take seriously our social media work. You can follow me on Twitter. I try to keep as much of the information out there as possible that I think we even have up today information about, you know, Texas elections. This is all nonpartisan information. That’s about knowing what your rights are. Knowing when the dates are, when you can read, when you can register, knowing where you can vote and knowing what are the conditions in which you should be reporting information back to to us so that we can try to try to troubleshoot the problem in real time. So people will be able to do that. And to you know, when I’m out doing election protection work, which I did in Alabama for the presidential election in November 2016. You know, we have our kind of set polling places that we’re, you know, monitoring. But you know what? When I look at my Twitter timeline and someone says, can you get to the such and such school that’s in such and such county? Because we think that this is what’s happening or because the lines are out the door and we can’t the machines seem to be changing the votes we get in the car and we drive to that county and we try to find out what’s going on and we get in touch with the county election board. And there are circumstances in which we get in touch with the state election board and tell them that you need to have the polls open an extra hour because of what happened this morning and so forth. So we’re troubleshooting in real time on that day. And so however, people can reach us with changes that they think are problematic. We saw I think you may have seen last week or two weeks ago at the early polling, polling sites in Chatham County, Georgia, folks out with the Confederate flags. And we just joined a bunch of local groups in North Carolina, NAACP and others really demanding that the state election board vigorously respond to this issue of voter intimidation. So it’s already happening because we’re already in early voting some places and Super Tuesday will be next next week. But if you’re looking for that information, we’re trying to be a kind of resource that we need in the absence of. Aggressive action by the Department of Justice. And then the last thing I’ll say is we should remember what we learned from the Mueller report, that we now also have to worry about foreign influence and foreign powers who disproportionately targeted African-American voters on Facebook Russia disproportionately. We were by and away the the the most targeted group for the disruption, disinformation and chaos campaign that Russian actors launched in 2016. And we just heard last week that that Russia intends to use the same playbook. So we should assume that once again, we’re gonna be under attack. I, along with other civil rights leaders, spent a year talking with folks at Facebook, trying to get them to take seriously these threats. And they’ve made some moves. They haven’t made all the moves we’ve wanted. In particular, they’ve continued to allow for politicians to be accept it, accepted or exempted from their rules on on misinformation. And so that means our community has to be super aware. We love Facebook, where disproportionate uses are Facebook. And so it’s it’s we have to in in our families and our churches, people have to be looking at this with a skeptical eye. Right. Facebook is not a newspaper. No, it is not the nightly news. And so we have to have a discerning, critical eye about what we see, about what we share. A lot of what was done in 2016 was to get us fighting with each other. Yes. So. So we have to be like never before vigilant. So vigilant this year. And it’s on every single one of us to play a role in that vigilance. I’ve told people when they say, what can I do? What can I do? I always vote. What can I do? Well, vote early so that you can help get people to the polls. Right. Report what you see. Make sure that you’re an informed voter. I bother people about this all the time. I know you vote, but you actually don’t know anything about the sheriff candidate. Be honest, right. This is important that we take voting so seriously. The reason that people marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and that we had a voting rights movement in the 1960s was because black people believed that if we could obtain political power, we could change the material conditions of our communities. It was not just to be symbolic, to show we were citizens. It was to obtain power so that we could transform our own lives. So if you are voting, that’s the first part. The second part is the transformation and power pop part. And that means you’ve got to be showing up at those school board meetings. You have to be showing up at the county commission meetings. You have to be vigilant, not just voting for the people, but then holding them to account to deliver what what they promised and what you demand.

[0:43:19 Peniel] Citizenship is a responsibility and not a burden. Yes. Thank you. Sherilyn, I feel we’ve just had a very stimulating conversation with the president and director, counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Defense and Educational Fund, who is really this is the nation’s premier civil rights law organization on the front front lines of voting suppression, criminal justice reform, voting rights activism and safeguarding democracy for black and brown people, but for really all people in the United States and beyond. Sherrilyn Ifill can be reached on Twitter at s i f i l l  underscore l_d f.  She has one hundred seventy three thousand Twitter followers. That’s really impressive. And you can follow her on social media and really do everything that you can to surveil LDF on social media and follow LDF on social media and do everything that you can to support voting rights. So show and I feel. Thank you for joining us.

[0:44:27 Sherrilyn] Thank you. I enjoyed it.

Thanks for listening to this episode and you can check out related content on Twitter at Peniel Joseph. That’s P-e-n-i-e-l  J-o-s-e-p-h and our Web site, CSRD.LBJ.utexas.edu and the Center for Study of Race and Democracy is on Facebook as well. This podcast was recorded at the Liberal Arts Development Studio at the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Thank you.