Since its founding nearly eighty-five years ago in 1940, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) has been fighting to protect the dignity and citizenship rights of Black people against efforts like Project 2025. In the decades after the Civil War, southern states enacted racial apartheid laws, also known as Jim Crow laws, to deprive Black people of their full citizenship and equal protection under the law, which they had been constitutionally granted under the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, also known as the Reconstruction Amendments. Thurgood Marshall founded LDF to challenge Jim Crow laws,3 which undermined the project of U.S. democracy. Those laws had to be replaced with affirmative civil rights protections in order for our multi-racial democracy to survive. Our democracy faces a similar crisis now