Washington Post:  “Sherrilyn Ifill was 10 years old when a New York City police officer shot and killed a boy her age in her Jamaica, Queens, neighborhood. She heard parents mourning his death at the bus stop on the way to school, talking about his family at the grocery store. Four decades later, she presided over one of the U.S.’s preeminent civil rights groups as the nation grappled with a new racial reckoning, from police violence to voting rights to equity in education. Ifill, 58, will step down as president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in the spring of 2022, she told The Washington Post.

“Her longtime deputy, Janai Nelson, 49, will succeed her, the organization said; an official date for the transition has not been set. Since taking over the LDF in 2013, Ifill presided over massive growth in the organization. Its staff grew from 55 employees, mostly attorneys, to more than 150, expanding into new grass-roots organizing and communications departments. The LDF created its own historical archive to document legal milestones and trailblazers of the civil rights movement. It established an internal think tank, the Thurgood Marshall Institute, to research civil rights law and structural racism.

“A law professor by training, Ifill grew the LDF’s budget by a factor of five — from $12 million to $60 million — and added nearly $100 million to its endowment fund. Her time as president and director-counsel began as the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down election law preclearance requirements from the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a ruling that experts say opened the door for increasingly stringent voter restrictions in Republican-controlled states. It ends after landmark victories against President Donald Trump and his administration: suing the then-president to defeat a commission on voter fraud, Attorney General William P. Barr on a policing commission, and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy over planned mail slowdowns ahead of the 2020 presidential election.”