Community
Social Justice & Advocacy
For those working in or fighting for racial equity and civil rights. Organize, inform, and move from conversation to action.
The brief
Where to take it when it is real
There is a difference between an organization that will publicize a thing and one that will litigate it. If something has actually happened to you or to somebody near you, these are the doors that do the second.
The Legal Defense Fund litigates, and it is not the NAACP
LDF has been wholly separate from the NAACP since 1957. It works by impact litigation — cases chosen to change a law or a policy for a large group rather than to settle one dispute — with more than seventy staff attorneys and hundreds of cooperating attorneys, out of New York, Washington and Atlanta.
The NAACP works through local units
The national body is the one people know; the branch is where a school board, a police commission or a landlord actually gets moved. Finding your unit is the first step and it is usually the only one that matters.
The Lawyers' Committee is the third door
Founded at the request of the President in 1963 to bring the private bar into civil rights work. It takes voting, housing, education and criminal justice matters, and it is often the fastest route to a lawyer who does this for a living.
Check your registration before an election, not during one
Purges are quiet and they are legal in many states. Checking takes under a minute and is the single highest-leverage thing anyone in this room can ask ten people to do.
Every link above was fetched on 2026-08-31 before it was published. Four were dead on the first pass and were replaced rather than printed.
They did this work first
The RecordDoing it now
The directory11 Black-owned businesses in this directory work in what this room is about. Counted from the listings, so it moves when they do.