In Pursuit of Justice: The Lawyer Fighting Modern Day Lynchings in the United States

There are so many words one could use to describe Jill Collen Jefferson. A force of nature. A powerhouse. An activist. A lawyer. An advocate. In truth, she is all of these things at once. But it’s easy to forget the most important of all — she is human. 

The former speechwriter to Barack Obama and Harvard law graduate has dedicated her life to fighting racial injustice. As a self-proclaimed “disciple of civil rights”, Jill founded JULIAN — a non-profit civil rights and international human rights organisation. JULIAN’s mission is to remedy the repugnant fact that most killings of Black people go unreported or under-investigated. It’s also on a mission to bring an end to modern day lynchings — a still gruesome reality in the United States. 

The new short film, ‘History on Repeat’ documents a fictional day in her life in a way that is as close to the bone of reality as you can get without following Jill herself around with a camera. It’s a brisk two and a half minutes — but that's long enough to leave you feeling unsettled in the most necessary way. 

The compounding penetrative nature of the film is a credit to director, Meena Ayittey. Her commitment to both the story and cause has made this work a formidable piece of artistry. 

In the final moments of ‘History on Repeat’, two pieces of text flash upon the screen, leaving an imprint. They are: 

“The injustice never ends.” Followed by, “The pursuit of justice must never end.”

In this powerful interview, Jill tells LBB’s Tará McKerr about her unending pursuit of justice. 

LBB> Jill, please tell us about the work that JULIAN is dedicated to and its importance today.

Jill> We believe in creating freedom. The way we create freedom is by innovating litigation, policy, and tech to erase fear on a mass scale while disarming power. That's what we do. In doing that, we are charting the future of civil and human rights. JULIAN's mission is to attack discrimination in all forms through legal advocacy, technology, and policy to enact justice, foster equality and advance the doctrines of civil and human rights law.

We do this to protect and uplift the voices of individuals and communities subjected to hate crimes and rights violations. Our intention and everything that we do is to revive the spirit effectiveness, strategy, and impact of the civil rights movement. 

We are the first and only organisation of its kind that centres innovation and creativity while investigating, litigating, and mounting civil rights campaigns. 

Our goals are these: we're going to end lynchings, we're going to end and justify police killings, we're going to end hate crimes and rights violations, we're going to make it to where we live in the utopia that we've been dreaming about; the beloved community that our ancestors have been talking about for so long. 

What makes our work so important is how unique it is. We're the only organisation in the nation with a focus on the existence of modern-day lynchings by investigating and litigating those cases. We also create new legal theories and methods for achieving justice in and outside the courtroom. That's incredibly important to us. We innovate civil rights, law, policy, and strategy in that way. Where other organisations focus solely on civil rights or human rights law, JULIAN integrates the two doctrines, fostering more pathways to justice. Our staff and our volunteers live in the communities we serve, giving us unique access to our legal cases. 

Right now we're developing cutting-edge technology that will transform the way litigation proceeds, how crimes are tracked, and how individuals protest and engage on a mass scale. We're talking about what the world is going to look like in 100 years. But the thing that we need to realise is how urgent and necessary this work is right now — that lynchings are happening. People are being killed because of how they look and how they're born. 

We've brought the continuation of lynchings in America to national attention. We've also convened Obama administration policy analysts, and we created a policy agenda for civil and human rights. Some of those policies have already been adopted by President Biden's administration. We forced the firing of a corrupt police chief in Mississippi and the poorest county in the country. And that firing has led to other police forces changing their practices. 

LBB> As an individual, what motivates you to do the work you do? Who inspired JULIAN?

Jill> You know, first off, I'll say that for me, when I was 18, I was a first-year student at the University of Virginia and I met Professor Julian Bond. He took me under his wing and mentored me from that moment until the day he passed away in 2015. 

One of the first things that he told me was that my purpose in life was to be a disciple of civil rights. He said he could tell that was my purpose I needed to carry out because I understood civil rights in a way that my peers didn't. After he told me that I started thinking more about civil rights. I started diving into the movement and I fell in love with it. I think it is my God- given purpose on this earth. Motivation is just in me. It's kind of like breathing. 

I also look to the lessons of the civil rights movement, those lessons, those stories about what happened then, and what those activists and leaders went through — that's something that inspires me now. So I think about, you know, what John Lewis felt on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. I think about people who've gone through things that I'm going through right now and harder things, even. And they made it. Also, their spirit, the love that they had for each other, and their dedication to their cause, inspires me. 

Changing things and having somebody not have to feel the way I felt growing up (and feel sometimes now) is motivation in itself. It makes my day for somebody to be freer or to feel freer and empowered because of something some work that JULIAN did. 

I get motivated very easily. I've always been this way. I'm motivated by bullshit, by racism, by injustice. It motivates me and makes me want to change things. The more I see it, the more pissed I get. And then the harder I work, the more strategies I come up with and the harder I look for different ways to change things. 

It's the bad stuff that motivates me. I try to take all of it and turn it into positive energy and put that energy toward the work. 

LBB> Can you talk to us about how your relationship with Great Guns began and how it evolved?

Jill> So the relationship with Great Guns began when they brought Meena in. They just took on this project where all of them were passionate about it and wanted to see justice done. They all did their part to help JULIAN, its cause, these families and communities. 

LBB> What was your experience working with Meena like?

Jill> Man, I have to tell you, I love Meena. We clicked immediately, just immediately. When she was first brought onto the project, I watched one of her short films, and I was blown away by it.  So, I went into the project, already being a fan of hers. Working with her, Oh my gosh — she just listens and cares. If you say, “I want this thing or this is a better reflection of me than this”, she takes that into consideration. She incorporates it. It was truly like a partnership doing this, where she listened to my concerns, she really listened to what I was saying about these families and my relationship with them. I really think this film captures the love that we have between us, not just between the families and I but between myself and Meena. 

LBB> What is the success rate of the cases JULIAN takes on?

Jill> At JULIAN, we're at about a 90% success rate, which is really good. I will say that JULIAN tends to take the hardest cases. Our cases are incredibly complex. There are cases that others have failed to solve and have failed to get traction on. People then come to us. Our success rate is a reflection of our cases being that difficult. For example, there’s the Willie Andrew Jones Jr. lynching case of 2018 — a case that the sheriff's department didn't solve, that Mississippi Bureau of Investigation didn't solve, that the FBI couldn't figure out. We solved that. So we do what other people a lot of times can't. So our success rate, especially for the work that we do, is incredibly good.

LBB> Give us some examples of how previous funding has helped JULIAN serve in the fight against discrimination.

Jill> A lot of people don't know this, but I found a JULIAN with my savings from working at a private firm in DC for a year. When I ran out of money, NBA champion Drew Holliday and his wife, Lauren Holiday, FIFA  World Cup winner, stepped in and gave us a grant. And when I tell you that because of that grant we kept the lights on. Before, our legal database subscriptions were turned off, because we didn't have money to pay the bills. That grant literally allowed us to do the work that we do because we couldn't do the research for our cases without those database subscriptions. 

Funding has allowed us to travel to investigate our cases. A lot of times we have to be on the scene to investigate things and that costs gas. That means accommodation and flights a lot of time in order to do justice to this. 

The public narrative of cases is often a lie and so you have to start from scratch on so many of these cases. That takes a lot of legwork and groundwork. 

Not only are we working on current cases of modern-day lynching (most recently a decapitation case) but cases going back as far as the year 2000 when modern-day lynchings first started happening. 

We have buckets of passion, but at the end of the day, passion is not going to get you a plane ticket. Passion is not going to pay for filing fees for court. And so our funding has allowed us to file cases. So often, the work that we do is for free, because the money just isn't there. 

Often we have to hide people because their lives are in danger. And so we have to have money to hide them whilst we work on the case. This is true life or death work that we're doing. The work that we do is so dangerous. So this is about safety as well. The funding we have has kept us safe. It has literally been a protection. When I tell you that funding is the difference between life and death, between operating and non-operating, between making an impact and having no impact. I wish it wasn't like that. But we live in a capitalist society and that's what it is. And so that's the reality of the world we live in

LBB> What are the most pressing areas that need funding right now?

Jill> I really love this question. I wish more people would ask it. 

So, right now at the beginning of 2023, all of this stuff is so fresh because we're doing this planning presently. We have the cases on our docket that need to be funded; that is, more cases on our docket than most of the civil rights organisations doing this work, yet we have the smallest amount of funding out of any of them. Just to say that, again, we're doing the toughest work and the most complex cases, with the biggest consequences and the least amount of funding.

The cases we need to fund include the Leon Hays lynching case. That's the lynching that happened in 2021 in Mississippi, and that the police have swept that under the rug. It is something that desperately needs to be funded. We need to be able to go on the ground and investigate this case, to be able to find documents, to have time and hire people to go and review documents that are in courtroom basements. 

Also, we don't even have an office space and this is something we desperately need. That is going to cost $450,000 in total. But that amount is a one-time cost — there's no rent. That is to have an office space. We have the land already, but we need 450k to actually get this office. My team is spread out across the United States and we don't have a place to come together. It's not as easy as just renting a room, especially in Mississippi, that just isn’t an option. The places where we work are places that are incredibly controversial and where our presence there puts our lives in danger if people know that we're there. We will have to work surreptitiously having our own space with our own security, a gate and all that kind of stuff to protect us. We need that for our training, we need that for our safety and we need that for production.  

I do the majority of my work out of a bedroom in my mother's house and the distractions are endless. We found these incredibly innovative modules that come pre-made that can be shipped to us from China. And hell, these things are innovative; they're fire-resistant, wind-resistant, and anti-corrosion. We're talking about having a permanent office space for the next 50 years at least that won't need any work. And it only costs $450,000. That's something that tends to cost millions. But we’ve found ways to cut costs. It's also going to be partially solar-powered. 

Our docket is going to cost $1.8 million. So if we include the office space the total is about 2.2 million in total that we need to raise for 2023, for the most pressing stuff.  That's not five years down the road. That's right now the work that we're doing.

LBB> Talk to us about how exactly such donations may help JULIAN achieve its goals. 

Jill> The goals for us are to end lynchings, unjustified police killings, all hate crimes and rights violations. The way the funding will help us do this is by helping us fund litigation that is going to change laws and the way the courts actually handle these cases. 

The way that we stop these hate crimes from happening is intervening before they happen whilst also changing the narrative around othering. It's in changing the narrative and messaging around civil and human rights and getting people to understand that they shouldn't just be something that you engage with when somebody dies, or when tragedy strikes. So getting people to understand that changing that narrative, around rights,  and about how we think about it is going to help us with our organising.  This will then help us to reach our goals. 

The other thing is our policy proposals. When we propose policies, it's not just the time and energy it takes to think about the policies, it's also creating the signs for the Board of Aldermen, getting all the materials made, the T-shirts etc. So often, especially on a municipal level, areas don't have the funding to enact these policy changes that have been proposed on their own. That's where we step in as well, we can help with that. Having funding to change policies or change what the laws are to prevent these things from happening, again, these rights violations, that is what funding will help us to do. 

I mentioned earlier the cutting-edge technology we are working on — that's something that funding is going to help us develop. This is a technology that is going to interrupt the rights violations. It can intervene in situations to prevent violations, as well as loss of life, whilst helping us win court cases, especially in assisting with evidence. We have this whole concept, we just need to be able to pay people to put it together and do the developing, then we can put this technology out in the world where it can begin to change the world.

This is what we're talking about. We didn't get into this game and then found JULIAN for small beans; this is worldwide change.

Unlike any other civil rights organisations, we are inundated with requests because we are so effective. At such a young age (we're only two years old) we've already accomplished so much without having even a fraction of the funding we need. 

Imagine, even a year from now if we had the funding that we need, how much we could accomplish. Imagine 10 years from now, what the world would look like. We can end lynchings in less than 10 years, we can help with the investigations for them, and make sure the federal laws prevent them instead of just being hollow laws, we can change things, we can stop hate crimes, we can put a dent in hate itself in a decade. 

This is what I'm talking about. This is not just a world to leave for our children. This is the world we're going to live into. This is creating the world that we want to live in. People have been talking about how change needs to come for so long. And that change is here. So we need to embrace it. You have people who figure out strategies and concepts to solve some of the most pressing problems. And so we need to trust them and give them the backing to solve that. And JULIAN is one of those organisations that is at the forefront of that change.

You can find more information about JULIAN's work and how to donate here.