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We lost an LDF legend - Ms. Jean Fairfax. If you don’t know about her please take the time to read our tribute. Organizer, education visionary, master strategist who shaped and influenced Title I. naacpldf.org/our-thinking/l…
The work of Jean Fairfax spanned nearly half a century. The great Derrick Bell first met Fairfax when she was organizing rural families in Mississippi around education in the years after Brown. He writes movingly about her in his book Silent Covenants.
As Director of @NAACP_LDF’s Division of Legal Information and Community Services, Jean Fairfax oversaw the publication of groundbreaking and influential reports about poverty, employment discrimination and education. 
One of the most hard-hitting was “It’s Not the Distance, It’s The Niggers,” - the words of a white mother who opposed busing her child to integrated schools in Richmond. The decision to name the report after these raw words broke through myths about why whites resisted busing.
The inside cover of #JeanFairfax’s report on white resistance to busing reproduced the Washington Post interview with the white mother in Richmond whose words became the name of our report.
As Chair of the Committee on School Lunch Participation #JeanFairfax oversaw the publication of Their Daily Bread, a ground-breaking study revealing discrimination & inadequacy in the school lunch program. The findings were taken up by the #PoorPeoplesCampaign as a core issue.
I will forever treasure the time I spent with #JeanFairfax when former @NAACP_LDF Director-Counsels Ted Shaw, Elaine Jones and I visited with her in Phoenix three years ago. Hours of discussion about her work, contemporary battles, w/her pushing me to have clarity about strategy.
