Thread by @Sifill_LDF

I’m gonna say this before things get out of hand on legal SCOTUS. B/c it is true that many brilliant attys & profs, especially women, have been predicting this moment since 2018. The voices of the “calm down” folks (largely men) were given greater prominence and credibility.

#AppellateTwitter presented the Court and the cases that many of us were litigating as just part of the elaborate secret world of elite litigators. They assigned complex, tactical motives to the Court’s every decision & assumed good faith.

So let me make sure we’re clear that it was civil rights lawyers who have been ringing the alarm for DECADES. When many focused on Roberts’ brilliance & charm. When we took heat from our own community & opposed Justice Thomas BEFORE the Anita Hill allegations.

We rang the alarm on voting rights. We told you that Shelby was the beginning of a devastating campaign of disenfranchisement. That an attack on Black voting rights is an attack in democracy itself.

That white supremacy is a uniquely pernicious and destructive force. We focused on the South. We understood that oppression is always workshopped on Black ppl first. That oppression against Black ppl in the South was worthy of our undivided attention.

We largely stayed out of the Supreme Court for most issues - recognizing the danger. We believed preserving rights and critical civil rights statutes was more important than notching our belts with arguments before the Court. So we were selective & strategic.

We focused for decades on removing electoral barriers for our ppl at the local level. My first cases at LDF were challenges to judicial elections in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas. We recognized the need to try to out power in the hands of folks at the local lvl.

We pioneered advocacy to bring diversity to the federal bench beginning with President Carter. It was Elaine Jones then in @NAACP_LDF’s D.C. office that opened this area of work and brought the first serious wave of racial & gender diversity to the federal courts.

I appreciate those who’ve been calling this moment more recently. Those who’ve become ardent advocates. But interestingly, those converts are now the new “experts.” And so let put in a clear marker for the work of civil rights lawyers.

It has not been easy for us to speak out AND litigate. We put our clients first always. We sounded the alarm to awaken our profession, our own ppl, politicians and influencers. Often we were ignored. We could feel the eye-rolling. We had a Black President & AG. We were alarmist.

When some of us told our LGBTQ colleagues after Obergefell that the win wld need to be protected fiercely, it was our experience talking. When we sounded the alarm on dozens of judicial nominees refusing to say that Brown was correctly decided & the profession largely yawned.

So let’s all work together and fight. But let’s not recreate the same phenomenon by crediting the expertise of those who have passionately come to the work over the past 7 years over those who accurately diagnosed & worked these issues for DECADES.

The dissenters in Dobbs quoted Justice Marshall’s final dissent from 1991: “Power not reason is the new currency of this Court’s decisionmaking.” This did not just start recently.