“Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness — those should be basic-ass things, but right now for a lot of people, they are still luxuries.”
Jill Collen Jefferson
Founder of JULIAN
In what might be my favorite episode yet, we’ll hear from Jill Collen Jefferson. She’s probably one of the most badass people I’ve ever met. After growing up “in the sticks” in one of the most racist counties in rural Mississippi, Jefferson went on to become a speechwriter for Barack Obama, and from there to graduating from Harvard Law.
She became a successful corporate attorney, which was a big win for her on a number of levels: As you can probably imagine, she went through a lot to get there, not just in the world around her, but also within herself. Fear and doubt nearly crippled her several times along the way, and she opens up about how she overcame all of that.
Even still, despite that success, her soul wanted something different, even if it meant making (much) less money and living a harder life: Jefferson started JULIAN, a legal nonprofit through which she investigates modern-day lynchings and other forms of what she — aptly — describes as racial terrorism.
It’s brutal work. She carries a .38 Magnum for protection and spends most of her days dealing with corrupt authority figures in various small, rural towns around the country, often in her home state of Mississippi.
She sees things happening to Black people today that, from her point of view, the country at large seems to believe — or want to believe — stopped happening a long time ago. And she’s trying to do something about it.
She’s had some big wins too, recently winning a million-dollar settlement for the family of a lynching victim.
Jill’s remarkable, our conversation was sobering and revelatory, and although some of the subject matter gets hard and heavy, her story is more than worth your time.
Thank you for listening.
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