Sherrilyn Ifill

speaker

121 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 4 Jul

Sherrilyn Ifill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Rachel Maddow Show · We the People America 250: Country at a Crossroads - Part 2 · 4 Jul 2026 podcast

And at the end of that war, as the Union is attempting to come together, the person who was leading the country is assassinated in a Confederate conspiracy that meant to assassinate him and the Vice President and the Secretary of State.

Does it get more bleak than that moment?

And in that moment, these people come together to try to create this new nation.

And the top priority is integrating four million black people who had been deemed by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case in 1856, 1857, to not be citizens.

That is, whether they were enslaved or free, said the Chief Justice Roger Taney, black people could not be citizens.

So now you have all of these stateless persons in the country, 180,000 black troops served in the Civil War.

You have this incredible abolitionist movement that has now come to the point of its work.

The Emancipation Proclamation almost immediately follows in 1863, and then in 1866, the 13th Amendment.

And they have to figure out what to do to make this country to try to get to that declaration.

And they do this incredible thing.

They stitch this country together in a way that is imperfect, but that brings us closer to that goal.

They finally go back over the first Constitution and pull this promise of equality from the Declaration to include the Equal Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment.

The word equal does not appear in our Constitution before 1868.

So the story of our country, like we're missing all the good stuff, all the good bits, right?

Yes, the beginning, you know, the war and the fighting of tyrants and all of the work that went into the formation of the country and across the square, you know, the guy sitting in the room writing, you know, the Constitution in the heat of the summer and the whole thing.

You know, you've seen Hamilton.

You know what it's all about.

But are we going to give up these other moments?

Are we going to give up this second founding after the Civil War?

And we live in the country of the second founding.

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