Here’s the introduction to their report..
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund recently launched a civil rights lawyer scholarship program as a pipeline to “address racial injustice and inequality in the South.” NewsHour Weekend’s Ivette Feliciano spoke with Associate Director-Counsel, Janai Nelson about the program and its significance in the current political climate.
Read the Full Transcript
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Hari Sreenivasan:
This week the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund launched the Marshall-Motley scholars program. It’s a pipeline project that hopes to get prospective civil rights attorneys from law school to the courtroom. And a $40 million anonymous donation is making it possible.
NewsHour Weekend’s Ivette Feliciano recently spoke with the LDF’s associate director-counsel, Janai Nelson, about the scholarship program.
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Ivette Feliciano:
So, Janai, the Marshall-Motley Scholars program has been described as a comprehensive lawyer development program that leaves nothing up to chance. What does that mean?
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Janai Nelson:
That means we’ve taken care of tuition, we’ve taken care of incidentals, we are providing summer internship opportunities, we are providing a postgraduate two-year fellowship. And then we also plan to support these participants in their journey of becoming civil rights lawyers over the course of the following eight years as they build a law practice in the South.
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Ivette Feliciano:
Named after Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court Justice and Constance Baker Motley, the nation’s first Black woman to serve as a federal judge, the program hopes to support 50 civil rights lawyers over the next 20 years.
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Janai Nelson:
So when we consider the amount of student debt that African-American students in particular hold, that was a significant reason for us to make this investment and think about how we can ensure that these students are not burdened or diverted from the path of civil rights work because of that debt.
Seventy-two percent of Black students take on student debt as compared to 56 percent of their white peers. And as many recent reports have shown, Black women bear a disproportionate burden of student debt. In fact, they bear the most burden of any other group in this country as it comes to student debt. So by investing in this new generation of civil rights lawyers who don’t have to worry about that debt if they pursue a law school education, we are in many ways tackling at least part of the wealth gap and part of the gender gap as it comes to as it is as it pertains to wealth.
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Ivette Feliciano:
Why is it important to launch this program right now?
Read the rest of the interview at https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/building-a-new-generation-of-civil-rights-lawyers
