Sherrilyn Ifill to Present St. Norbert College Norman & Louis Miller Lecture

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From St. Norbert College, October 9, 2023
by Eva Westein, eva.westein@snc.edu, 920-403-3153

“A Conversation with Sherrilyn Ifill,” the Fall 2023 Norman & Louis Miller Lecture in Public Understanding, will be held at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 17, in Walter Theatre of the Abbot Pennings Hall of Fine Arts, 315 Third St., De Pere. Ifill, president and director-counsel emeritus of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, will begin the program with brief remarks. She will then be joined on stage for a conversation-style interview with Sarah Spain, ESPN personality, and Robyn Davis, president and CEO of Brown County United Way. The program is free and open to the public.

Ifill is the Vernon E. Jordan Jr., Esq., Endowed Chair in Civil Rights at Howard University Law School, where she also heads the multi-disciplinary 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy. She served as the seventh president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) from 2013 to 2022. She increased the organization’s visibility through litigating urgent civil rights issues and elevating the organization’s decades-long leadership fighting voter suppression, inequity in education and racial discrimination in the criminal justice system. For more than 20 years prior, Ifill taught civil procedure and constitutional law at the University of Maryland School of Law in Baltimore and pioneered law clinics focused on challenging legal barriers to the reentry of ex-offenders.

Ifill was named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2021. In 2022, she joined The Ford Foundation organization as a senior fellow and received the prestigious Brandeis Medal.

Spain, an Emmy and Peabody Award winner, is the co-host of the “Spain and Fitz” ESPN radio show, a columnist for espnW, a SportsCenter reporter and host of the “That’s What She Said” podcast. She co-hosted ESPN Radio’s first all-women program featuring three hosts, “espnW Presents: The Trifecta,” as well as “Spain & Prim,” one of the first national sports radio shows both produced and hosted by women. Spain began her career at ESPN as an update anchor for ESPN 1000 in 2010.

Davis has served as president and CEO of Brown County United Way since May 2017. The community-impact organization unites people, ideas and resources to create community solutions that strengthen every person and every community. Prior to joining Brown County United Way, Davis led Freedom House Ministries Inc. in Green Bay as president for eight years.

The Norman & Louis Miller Lecture in Public Understanding was established in 1993 by the Norman Miller Family Foundation to honor Norman’s brother, Louis Miller, who died in 1989. When Norman died in 2008, his name was added to the lecture series, which promotes unity, communication and tolerance among different cultures, religions, ethnicities and traditions.

For more information and to register, call the Norman Miller Center at 920-403-3881 or visit https://www.snc.edu/millercenter/lectureseries.