History in the Making: Sherrilyn Ifill in Conversation With Janai Nelson

glamour.com:

By When Thurgood Marshall founded the Legal Defense and Education Fund under the NAACP umbrella in 1940, America was embroiled in racial discrimination and early fights for civil rights.

Eighty years later, the charge against our nation's inequities and injustices is Sherrilyn Ifill, who first joined the organization in 1988 as an assistant counsel in the area of voting rights.Following a 20-year hiatus from the institution in order to teach law at the University of Maryland, where she accomplished groundbreaking centered on civil rights, discrimination, and lynchings in the 21st century, Ifill returned in 2013 to take the reins as the seventh president and director-counsel of LDF.

She was the second woman ever to do so, behind . Since then, she has evolved the institution into one of powerful influence on policy and legislation.On Monday, March 14, Ifill will pass the mantle to her longtime deputy and current associate director-counsel, Janai Nelson.

It will be a historic event: the first woman-to-woman succession in the firm's storied 81-year history. “It's a very exciting moment,” Ifill says of the transition. “It's bittersweet, because I so love LDF.