NOTE: This event is now SOLD OUT! To join the waitlist, contact the Office of Presidential & Trustee Events at (309) 438-8790.
Civil rights lawyer and scholar Sherrilyn Ifill will be the featured speaker for the 2024 Martin Luther King Jr. Cultural Dinner at 6 p.m. on Friday, January 26, 2024, in the Brown Ballroom, Bone Student Center.
From 2013-2022, Ifill served as the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), the nation’s premier civil rights law organization fighting for racial justice and equality. She is currently a distinguished professor of practice at Harvard Law School (Fall 2023), and she serves as a Ford Foundation fellow at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), leading a project focused on exploring the values of the 14th Amendment in artistic expression. Ifill was most recently appointed to be the Inaugural Vernon Jordan Endowed Chair in Civil Rights at Howard Law School, where she will launch the 14th Amendment Center for Law and Democracy.
Ifill began her career as a fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union, before joining the staff of the LDF as an assistant counsel in 1988, where she litigated voting rights cases for five years. In 1993, Ifill left LDF to join the faculty at University of Maryland School of Law in Baltimore. Over 20 years, Ifill taught civil procedure and constitutional law to thousands of law students and pioneered a series of law clinics, including one of the earliest law clinics in the country focused on challenging legal barriers to the re-entry of ex-offenders, and a clinic on reparations.
Ifill is also a prolific scholar who has published academic articles in leading law journals, op-eds, and commentaries in leading newspapers. Her 2008 book, On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century, was highly acclaimed, and is credited with laying the foundation for contemporary conversations about lynching and reconciliation. A 10th anniversary edition of the book was recently released with a foreword by Bryan Stevenson, the acclaimed lawyer and founder of the national lynching memorial in Montgomery, Ala.
This event is presented by Illinois State University’s Office of the President, University Housing Services, Office of Equity and Inclusion, the Association of Residence Halls, and the Black Student Union.
