LDF as a law student. Constance L. Rice, civil rights activist and founder of the Advancement Project. Spottswood William Robinson III, the first African-American appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Theodore Shaw, Julius L. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Professor Shaw served as the fifth president and director-counsel. Christina Swarns, the Executive Director of the Innocence Project. She previously served as the director of litigation for LDF and, in that role argued and won Buck v. Davis in the U.S. Supreme Court. She is one of the few African-American women to have ever argued a case in the Supreme Court. Holly A. Thomas, a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Maya Wiley, an MSNBC Legal Analyst, civil rights activist, lawyer, and 2021 mayoral candidate for New York City and the Henry Cohen Professor of Urban Policy and Management at The New School. Wiley is also the former board chair of the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board, and former counsel to the Mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio. References Further reading Clemon, U. W., and Bryan K. Fair. "Making Bricks Without Straw: The NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Development of Civil Rights Law in Alabama 1940-1980." Alabama Law Review 52 (2000): 1121+. online Greenberg, Jack. Crusaders in the Courts: Legal Battles of the Civil Rights Movement (2004) Hooks, Benjamin L. "Birth and Separation of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund," Crisis 1979 86(6): 218–220. 0011–1422 King, Gilbert. Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America (2012) Pulitzer Prize; excerpt Klinetobe, Charles. "Jury Trials and Gerrymanders: The Legal Effort to Maintain Segregation in July of 1957." The Historian 68.2 (2006): 221-240. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6563.2006.00141.x Mosnier, L. Joseph. Crafting Law in the Second Reconstruction: Julius Chambers, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Title VII. (2005). Tauber, Steven C. "The NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the U.S. Supreme Court's Racial Discrimination Decision Making," Social Science Quarterly 1999 80(2): 325–340. Tauber, Steven C. "On Behalf of the Condemned? The Impact of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund on Capital Punishment Decision Making in the U.S. Courts of Appeals," Political Research Quarterly 1998 51(1): 191–219. Tushnet, Mark V. Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood