Dear Members of the Harvard Community,
I am delighted to announce that Sherrilyn Ifill will deliver the 2024 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture on Tuesday, October 29.
Each fall, we seek to recognize an individual who has advanced the causes of justice and equality through activism, advocacy, scholarship, or service. This year’s lecturer far surpasses our goals. Professor Ifill is a civil rights lawyer who, from 2013 to 2022, served as president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, a role that brought her to national prominence as a powerful voice for racial and social justice. Her work as an educator, scholar, and author has expanded and shaped the perspectives of countless individuals, and she is today the inaugural Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Esq. Endowed Chair in Civil Rights at Howard University, where she leads the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy.
Professor Ifill’s upcoming visit is, to our great fortune, a return to Harvard. In 2022, she received the Radcliffe Medal, and she served last year as the Steven and Maureen Klinsky Visiting Professor of Practice for Leadership and Progress at Harvard Law School. Delivering a lecture there last November, she spoke, in part, about what drives her, a lineage that includes “a whole cadre of extraordinary lawyers, who managed and figured out how to use law to make this country better, to move us—to inch us—towards greater health, and to move us towards the promise of democracy.”
I hope you will join me next month in Klarman Hall at Harvard Business School to hear from Sherrilyn Ifill. She has, inch by inch, helped to move our country forward, and I am eager to welcome her back to campus and to acknowledge her many contributions to some of the causes that Dr. King held dear.
Sincerely,
Alan M. Garber
