Alfred Charles Sharpton Jr. is an American civil rights and social justice activist, Baptist minister, radio talk show host, and TV personality, who is also the founder of the National Action Network civil rights organization. In 2004, he was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. presidential election. He hosts a weekday radio talk show, Keepin' It Real, which is nationally syndicated by Urban One, and he is a political analyst and weekend host for MSNBC, hosting PoliticsNation.
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that the freedom of speech protections in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution restrict the ability of public officials to sue for defamation. The decision held that if a plaintiff in a defamation lawsuit is a public official or candidate for public office, then not only must they prove the normal elements of defamation—publication of a false defamatory statement to a third party—they must also prove that the statement was made with "actual malice", meaning the defendant either knew the statement was false or recklessly disregarded whether it might be false. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan is frequently ranked as one of the greatest Supreme Court decisions of the modern era.
C. Vernon Mason is a former lawyer and civil rights advocate from Tucker, Arkansas. Best known for his involvement in several high-profile New York City cases in the 1980s, including the Bernhard Goetz, Howard Beach, and Tawana Brawley incidents, Mason has not practiced law since his 1995 disbarment. He then served as the CEO of a non-profit organization. He is also an ordained minister.
Tawana Vicenia Brawley is an African American woman from New York who gained notoriety in November 1987 at age 15 when she falsely accused four white men of kidnapping and raping her over a four-day period.
Seth Paul Waxman is an American lawyer who served as the 41st Solicitor General of the United States from 1997 to 2001. He is the co-chairman of the appellate and Supreme Court litigation practice group at the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr. As of 2022, he has appeared before the Supreme Court more than 80 times.
Kirkland & Ellis LLP is an American multinational law firm headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Founded in 1909, Kirkland & Ellis is the largest law firm in the world by revenue and the seventh-largest by number of attorneys. It was the first law firm in the world to reach US$7 billion in annual revenue.
Alan Morton Dershowitz is an American lawyer and law professor known for his work in U.S. constitutional law and American criminal law. From 1964 to 2013, he taught at Harvard Law School, where he was appointed as the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law in 1993. Dershowitz is a regular media contributor, political commentator, and legal analyst.
The National Action Network (NAN) is a not-for-profit, civil rights organization founded by the Reverend Al Sharpton in New York City, New York, in early 1991. In a 2016 profile, Vanity Fair called Sharpton "arguably the country's most influential civil rights leader".
Alton Henry Maddox Jr. was an American lawyer who was involved in several high-profile civil rights cases in the 1980s.
The Center for Constitutional Rights is a progressive non-profit legal advocacy organization based in New York City, New York, in the United States. It was founded in 1966 by lawyers William Kunstler, Arthur Kinoy, Morty Stavis and Ben Smith, particularly to support activists in the implementation of civil rights legislation and to achieve social justice.
Linda Fairstein is an American author, attorney, and former New York City prosecutor focusing on crimes of violence against women and children. She was the head of the sex crimes unit of the Manhattan District Attorney's office from 1976 until 2002.
Rachel Noerdlinger is an American publicist and longtime communications advisor to National Action Network and national civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton. She served as chief of staff to New York City First Lady Chirlane McCray. After leaving public service, Noerdlinger became a managing director at Mercury Public Affairs.
David Carliner was an immigration, civil liberties, and civil rights lawyer in Washington, D.C. Among the earliest practitioners of American immigration and naturalization law, he was an early combatant of anti-miscegenation laws, challenged the segregation of public accommodations, and fought for the rights of sexual minorities to enter the country and have full employment rights in the federal government. Carliner was chair of the District of Columbia Home Rule Committee and was responsible for the first modern home rule reforms in 1967. He served as the general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union (1976–1979); helped to found the ACLU's National Capital Area chapter and Global Rights ; and served on the boards of the ACLU (1965–1983), the American Jewish Committee (1969–1971), and a variety of other organizations. He was the author of the ACLU's 1977 handbook on immigrants' rights and a coauthor of its 1990 revision.
Sherrilyn Ifill is an American lawyer and the Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Esq. Endowed Chair in Civil Rights at Howard University. She is a law professor and former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She was the Legal Defense Fund's seventh president since Thurgood Marshall founded the organization in 1940. Ifill is a nationally recognized expert on voting rights and judicial selection. In 2021, Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world on its annual Time 100 list.
Michael John Kennedy was an American criminal defense attorney, expert in U.S. Constitutional law, and a civil rights advocate who defended cases for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (NECLC) and in his private practice. Kennedy, who tried cases in 36 states, was a member of the National Lawyers Guild and the State Bar in California and New York.
David Allan Rose was an American lawyer and judge who served as a Massachusetts state court judge for more than 40 years and active in many community and civil rights organizations. He was a judge of the Massachusetts Superior Court (1960–1972), and then an associate justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court (1972–1976); after reaching the mandatory retirement age of 70, he continued to serve as a recalled retired justice (1978–1985). He was the longtime chairman of the national executive committee of Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.
New York City has been the site of many Black Lives Matter protests in response to incidents of police brutality and racially motivated violence against black people. The Black Lives Matter movement began as a hashtag after the shooting death of African-American teen Trayvon Martin, and became nationally recognized for street demonstrations following the 2014 deaths of two African Americans, Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Garner was killed in the Staten Island borough of New York City, leading to protests, demonstrations, and work towards changes in policing and the law. Following the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota in 2020, the global response included extensive protests in New York City, and several subsequent changes to policy.
The 2004 presidential campaign of Al Sharpton, a civil rights activist from New York City, began with his expressed interest in May 2001. In August of that year, Sharpton announced the formation of an exploratory committee and began to campaign for the nomination of the Democratic Party. Sharpton had previously run for several elected offices throughout the 1990s, and many news outlets reported on how Sharpton was unlikely to gain the Democratic nomination, with some arguing that the primary point of his campaign was to raise his profile. Sharpton claimed that, while he was running with the intent to win, it was more important to him that his campaign help raise issues primarily concerning the African American community, regardless of whether he received the nomination or not.
The Sacrifice is a 2015 novel by the American writer Joyce Carol Oates. Set in blighted urban New Jersey in the 1980s, it follows a young Black woman, Sybilla, who is discovered in a degraded condition in an abandoned factory after going missing. When she alleges that she was kidnapped, assaulted, and left for dead by a group of white police officers, her cause is taken up by an ambitious and unscrupulous civil rights activist and his lawyer brother, despite evidence of deceit in her story. The events of the novel are based on the real-life Tawana Brawley case, and takes place in a part of New Jersey still suffering from the aftermath of post-war deindustrialization and the 1967 Newark riots.
Carey R. Dunne is an American attorney. He is known for leading the criminal investigation of Donald Trump for the office of the Manhattan District Attorney until his resignation from the case, alongside his colleague Mark F. Pomerantz, in February 2022. In that role, Dunne successfully argued Trump v. Vance before the United States Supreme Court in May 2020; the court held that President Trump was required to comply with a state grand jury subpoena for his tax returns. Prior to his service at the DA's Office, Dunne was a longtime partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell, where he specialized in white collar criminal defense. Dunne is a past president of the New York City Bar Association.
