Ifill speaks on civil rights, abolitionism

Keynote reflects on effort needed to sustain dreams

By LEXI GOLDSTEIN the daily northwestern @lexipgoldstein

Content warning: This story contains mentions of police violence

Civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn

Ifill reflected on Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech as the keynote speaker for Northwestern’s Dream Week in front of a packed audience in Pick-Staiger Concert Hall.

The event concluded the week commemorating Dr. King and was kicked off by a performance of the Black National Anthem by Soul4Real, NU’s premiere Black a cappella group.

Former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Ifill said dreaming is not enough and that putting in work is necessary.

“I just think it’s important that we remember that dreaming is also work,” Ifill said during the keynote. “When we listen to his speech, we don’t allow ourselves to be carried away into flights of fantasy, that we give due honor for the kind of metal it took for Dr. King to draw from himself that poetry.”

Ifill’s talk covered how the civil rights movement has evolved in recent years, with global protests following the torture and murder of George Floyd.

She noted that people of all ethnicities, ages and parts of the country participated in Black Lives Matter marches, demonstrating an expansion of civil rights marches in the ‘60s.

“They want you to give away your compassion and your love and it takes work not to do it,” Ifill said during the event. “It took work to get both feet on the floor the day after the November election in 2016. It took work after Charleston. It took work after the Tree of Life and Walmart.”

After Ifill’s speech, director of the Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic at Pritzker

» See KEYNOTE , page 6