The Law Dork Nine: Tona Boyd

Boyd talks with Law Dork about the story that started her on her path to the storied racial justice organization started by Thurgood Marshall — and the challenges we face today.

For the second edition of The Law Dork Nine, I reached out to someone whose work I’ve watched closely — whose work we’ve all seen — over the past decade as she settles into her role in the leadership of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund: Tona Boyd.

I’ve known Boyd for nearly two decades now, and nothing she accomplishes would ever surprise me — and she’s already accomplished much that would cap others’ careers.

Boyd is likely known across the country by many more for the work she has done than by name, but she has been in the thick of it in D.C., having worked in the White House Counsel’s Office earlier in the Biden administration on judicial nominations, among other matters. One of the key nominations she worked on in that role: Then-Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s successful nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Before that, you likely saw Boyd — often sitting behind Sen. Cory Booker at high-stakes Judiciary Committee hearings during the Trump administration when she was working for the Democratic senator as his chief counsel. Earlier in her career, Boyd was a lawyer in the Civil Rights Division at Main Justice and clerked for Judge Roger Gregory of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Now, more than a year into her time as the No. 2 at LDF, if you don’t know Boyd, you should. And, if you do, there’s always more to learn.

Here are Tona Boyd’s responses to The Law Dork Nine.

1. How do you wish to be identified for this?

Tona is great!

2. What is your work?

I am a civil rights lawyer. I currently serve as the Associate Director-Counsel at the Legal Defense Fund.

3. How does it relate to the law? (If this is obvious, feel free to skip it— or have fun with it.)

The Legal Defense Fund is the nation’s premier legal organization fighting for racial justice. We use the power of law, narrative, research, and people to defend and advance the full dignity and citizenship of Black people in America.

So while the law is one tool in the service of our mission — we leverage an integrated advocacy approach to further racial justice. 

4. What job or experience that you’ve had has most shaped your worldview?

I was about 10 years old when LAPD officers brutally beat Rodney King and I watched it play out on video on the news night after night. My family moved from the LA area to Ohio around the time of the LA riots that followed the officers’ initial acquittals. The injustice felt very personal, and I decided then that I wanted to be a civil rights lawyer.

I later started my legal career as a trial attorney in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division’s Criminal Section and had the privilege of working alongside the team that ultimately secured federal convictions for some of the officers involved in Rodney King’s beating. It was a full circle moment for me to start my civil rights career investigating and prosecuting law enforcement misconduct — I have often reflected on and call upon the resolve and determination of 10-year-old Tona throughout my career.

5. What’s an important thing that most people don’t know about your job or about something that you work on?

People often confuse the Legal Defense Fund for the NAACP. Our full organizational name, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (Legal Defense Fund or LDF for short), reflects the fact that we were founded by Thurgood Marshall in 1940 as the legal arm of the NAACP.

LDF separated from the NAACP in 1957, and we have been separate entities since then.

We often work in coalition with the NAACP, as legacy civil rights organizations, and often represent chapters of the NAACP in litigation. (For example, we currently have a voting rights case that is pending before the Supreme Court, and the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP is our client.)

6. What are you working on right now or have you recently completed that you want people to know about?

May 17th is the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, LDF’s landmark Supreme Court case that struck down the malignant “separate but equal” doctrine previously endorsed by the Court and dismantled state-sanctioned apartheid in the United States.

While Brown is foundational to our multi-racial democracy, and its legacy has impacted each and every person in America, its true promise has yet to be fully realized. Today school desegregation cases impacting thousands of students remain open on federal court dockets, and LDF continues to work to desegregate our nation’s schools. We are also opposing efforts to erase our history of racial inequality and its continuing effects on the present day through litigation. LDF is fighting to ensure access to historically accurate, truthful information in our curriculum and inclusive and diverse environments in our classrooms.

So, as we celebrate and commemorate the legacy of Brown and the brave parents and elementary school children who first stood up to demand that America live up to its promise of equality for all, we remain committed to building a future where there is equal access to educational opportunities, resources, and learning outcomes for all.

7. What area of the law do you think will be particularly important — or interesting — over the coming decade?

Voting rights are foundational to ensuring the survival of our multiracial democracy — and we as a nation are at an inflection point: Will we ensure full and equal access to the ballot — a right from which all other rights arguably flow — or will we continue to allow efforts to exclude, discriminate, and disenfranchise destroy American democracy?

The law has a critical role to play in answering that question — and I look forward to continuing to fight for a multi-racial, multi-ethnic democracy where dignity is sacred, power is shared, and thriving is the standard.

8. If you did something totally different with your life, career-wise, what would it be?

If I were not a lawyer, I’d probably run a community theater — and occasionally appear on stage. 😊

9. As most know, I’m a theater person. As a reminder that we (try to) have lives outside of our careers, what’s the book you’ve read, music you’ve listened to, or play you’ve seen recently that you would highly recommend to others? (Concerts, ballet, orchestra count, too!)

I did know that! As you can tell from my prior answer — I’m a theater person, too. 😊

But the last thing I saw that most impacted me was not a play, but Origin — the movie directed by Ava DuVernay that tells the story of Pulitzer Prize-winning Isabel Wilkerson’s journey to write the book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. It was incredibly powerful and piercing,  parts of it I still carry with me. I highly recommend it — it’s streaming now!