Marilyn Holifield '69

Marilyn Holifield ‘69 is an attorney based in the Miami office of Holland & Knight LLP, where she became the first Black female partner of a major Florida law firm in 1986. Named one of the 2013 Lawyers of the Year by The Best Lawyers in America, she was also a recipient of the Gertrude Rush Award from the National Bar Association in 2012 for her human and civil rights work and for being a model of excellence in the legal profession.

In 2011, the Anti-Defamation League awarded Holifield the Jurisprudence Award for her outstanding contributions to the legal profession and the community at large. That same year, the federal district judges of the Southern District of Florida chose her for the magistrate selection panel that pre-screened candidates for magistrate positions. Senators Bill Nelson and Marco Rubio appointed her to the federal judicial nominating commission for the Southern District of Florida. . In 2020, she became a member of the Executive Committee of Harvard’s Board of Overseers. She is the co-author of Seven Sisters and a Brother: Friendship, Resistance, and Untold Truths about Black Student Activism in the 1960s.

Holified, a resident of Coral Gables, Fla., rejoined the Board of Managers in 2012 after serving 1994-97. She earned a B.A. in economics with a concentration in Black Studies from Swarthmore and a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1972.