So lovely to have you here.
It's wonderful to be here.
Thank you, thank you, thank you,
I'm so happy to have you here.
So I want to get your title right, because last year you
passed on the mantle of President
and Director Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Yes, I did.
Now, how hard is it to leave that job?
Because you can't go, well, my work
here is done, because there's so much more work to do.
No, it was hard.
I love the Legal Defense Fund, it's
where I started my career, and I love the work.
And I feel like I was made for that position.
But I also feel like I led it at the right moment.
That almost 10 years that I led the organization
was right for me.
And I really believe transition is part of leadership.
I think especially in the civil rights space,
sometimes we hold on a little too long.
And I think it's healthy for our organizations
when we pass that mantle.
And fortunately for me, I had an amazing deputy,
Janai Nelson, who's now the head of the organization.
And I know that she can continue the work well.
And I have things I want to do, because the work
is not finished.
OK.
[applause]
And you said that, well, you've said that if you were
in the private sector, that you would be on the cover
of Forbes magazine.
Well, I think nonprofits get, we don't get no respect,
as Rodney Dangerfield used to say,
in that it's very hard to do this job.
And in addition to doing the substantive work,
you're a business leader.
You're leading a staff.
I mean, I grew LDF five times the size it was in staff,
in budget, in endowment.
And that's not a small thing.
[applause]
And you know, I think if you're running a for profit company
and you do that, people consider
you a financial wizard and a superstar.
Right.
And I think I was a superstar.
Absolutely.
So I think it's important to say it.
But does the nonprofit allow you
to do more of the type of work that you want to do,
like to achieve the goals that you want?
Or could you do that the same work
like in the private sector? - No.
I mean, when I was a little girl,
I wanted to become a civil rights lawyer.
That's what I wanted.
I wanted to be in a position where I could strategically
confront issues of inequality and injustice
wherever they are, however they appear.
Sometimes that means that we sue corporations.
Sometimes we sue states.
Sometimes we sue cities.
And so the nonprofit space allows us to be independent.
We don't take any money from government.
And that allows us to do whatever we have to do.
Because racism and white supremacy
is a complex structure.
And if you want to get at it structurally,
you have to be able to meet it where
those structures are kind of manifesting the injustice.
And you don't want to be restricted
in that by who gave you money or by the rules of government.
You want to be able to really get at it.
So I love being in the nonprofit sector.
I just want us to feel worthy of the kind of respect
that people get in for profit sector for all
the aspects of what we do.
And in fact, we do a little bit,
we do a lot with a little bit.
And we do it gladly and joyfully, because
of our commitment to the work.
So it's just, I love the nonprofit world,
and I particularly love the nonprofit civil rights world.
But now it's time to get paid!
[applause]
OK.
This is what I want to, right now, the Supreme Court,
they're hearing a case about affirmative action at college.
This keeps coming up over and over again.
Like, why do you think we're still having this battle?
Yeah, it's quite interesting.
You know, so I'm a litigator, and most litigators, lawyers
know that if you're going to take
a case up to the Supreme Court, you're bound by precedent.
If the Supreme Court has decided that issue before
and has decided it one way, it's very hard to get
the court to reverse course.
It happens, but it's hard to do,
and you have to really have a reason
for why you think at this moment the court should
reverse course.
But this court has been doing it quite a bit
at a brisk clip.
Yes.
And you know, obviously, we know
the Dobbs decision overturned Roe vs Wade,
a 50-year-old decision.
And affirmative action as well.
I mean, it's not as though the court
is not deciding affirmative action over and over again.
This is like, you just keep going till you
get the court you want.
In 1979 in the Bakke case, affirmative action
in college admissions was challenged and upheld.
It was upheld again then in the Grutter case
out of University of Michigan.
Then in 2016 again in the Fisher case,
University of Texas.
And after the University of Texas loss,
the man who has been behind this whole effort
basically said, using a kind of a clue
from the dissent of Justices Thomas and Alito,
I think I need Asian-American plaintiffs.
And he set about crafting a set of claims
that race conscious admissions is
actually discriminatory against Asian-Americans.
And that's the claim that he had brought
in Harvard, at Harvard.
And that's the case that's now before the Supreme Court.
But should the Supreme Court be hearing this again
when they just heard it in 2016 and before that just heard it
in 2002 and before that just?
But it's a new court, right.
And so you basically you have somebody
who keeps coming back, and now they have the court they want.
OK, but this scares me about the court though.
The court we have now.
I mean, the Supreme Court has really been
our only recourse for justice.
I mean, pretty much everything that we've
gotten as far as rights, right, has been based on a decision
from the Supreme Court.
Now like you said, Roe has been overturned.
What do we do now?
How do we get past this court?
Well, I think actually it's a sobering moment for us
to recognize that although I think many of us
grew up in a period of time where we believe
that, it's in fact, not true.
It is true that the court decided Brown vs Board
of Education, which ended legal apartheid in this country
and really changed American democracy.
And there have been many other civil rights
decisions from the court that have been wonderful.
Most of them have not been wonderful
actually in the history of the United States Supreme Court.
And so we've always had to supplement
it with legislative action.
With the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
with the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
with the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
We've had to supplement it with direct action,
with protests, with boycotts.
We've had to supplement it with education.
We've had to supplement it in all kinds of ways.
And so it's always been a multi-pronged strategy.
The problem we have now though, is that the court seems
bent on dismantling the successes we
make in those other realms.
And so we see that with, for example,
the Voting Rights Act, which has been severely weakened
by this Supreme Court.
That's where we have to really start to get worried.
And it is a real problem.
It is not something to be taken lightly.
And it's not just a partisan battle, as many people think.
I've been a civil rights lawyer for 30 years.
You win some and you lose some.
The rule of law is that you abide by what
the court says and does.
But you do that with the knowledge
that the court is behaving fairly and with integrity
and legitimately.
And when you start feeling like decisions are being made
without the proper foundation, then it
gets very hard to convince your clients
that it's a fair system.
And so I think we are in a kind of perilous moment
as it relates to the court.
Before you go, I know, you said
something I want to get to.
That you said our democracy, we're, it's like a teenager,
we're teenagers, we're young, it's like teenagers.
So what?
Democracy is what?
Staying up all night on Snapchat or something?
You know, I mean, yes.
Like teenagers who think they know
everything, who have a grandiose sense of themselves,
who throw tantrums.
Yes, we are.
I mean, if you think about American democracy, at least
for me, I wouldn't count America as a democracy.
Certainly as a nation, but not as a democracy until at least
1954 when Brown was decided.
Because you can't call a country a democracy--
[applause]
--if by law, a whole segment of citizens
can be denied the right to participate
in the political system.
So that's just, and that's being pretty generous.
That's 1954.
I would take it to 1965 with the Voting Rights
Act, because--
[applause]
--before the passage of the Voting Rights Act,
even though the right of Black people
should have been guaranteed by the 14th and 15th Amendments
to the Constitution, enacted and ratified after the Civil
War, most Black people then lived in the South,
and still live in the South, and most of the South
was denying the vote to Black people.
So until 1965, I wouldn't call us even credibly a democracy.
And if you think of it that way, then we are young.
And so we're still figuring this thing out.
And I'd say, Wanda, just to give people hope--
Please! Give me some hope.
I'm going to give you some hope.
Please!
Please, Sherrilyn, give me some hope!
We're also trying to do something
that no other country has done.
There is no template for the kind of multiracial democracy
with the kind of history of white supremacy and slavery.
There's no other country that's trying
to do that in the dynamic way that we are doing it.
We talk about being a nation of immigrants, which is not
entirely true, but immigration is
a huge part of the character of our country.
And 20th century immigration, for sure,
made the country have the cast that it does.
And so we're trying to create something
we're not trying to do something
like another country.
We're not pointing to them and saying, oh yeah, like that.
We are trying to do something very particular,
and it's hard.
And that's what I'm currently writing a book about.
It's called Is This America?
And it is about race, but it is also
about what I think of at this moment as the last best
chance for us to really create a healthy democracy
in this country.
OK, well, when you finish the book, I won't be here,
but I'm sure they'll bring you back
and there'll be a nice white guy sitting here, interviewer.