Battle for rights lives on
NEW YORK –The victory was momentous without a doubt – but for NAACP lawyers who worked on Brown v. Board of Education, it wasn’t the first civil rights battle won in court and it hasn’t been the last.
From the days of its founding in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People realized the importance of the courts in attaining racial equality. Lawyers for the organization, and later, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, set the stage for the 1954 Brown decision over more than a decade, chipping away at segregation and inequality at graduate schools and in teacher salaries before working their way to the case that challenged “separate but equal” all the way down to elementary schools.
“We were fighting for the heart of the nation,” Thurgood Marshall, who argued the case and went on to become the first black Supreme Court justice, told Ebony magazine much later.
Fifty years beyond the Brown decision, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund is still at it, proudly proclaiming a record of having litigated and won more cases in front of the Supreme Court than any other nongovernment organization. Along the way, the LDF has become a model of public-interest lawyering – though some wonder if its tactics are the best way to work for equality in the 21st century.
“The idea of a legal defense arm of a movement really was modeled by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. We’ve all followed that model,” said Evan Wolfson, formerly with Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund and now head of Freedom to Marry, which advocates for gay marriage equality.
Meanwhile, the LDF itself has evolved, working outside courthouses to monitor polls at elections and speak to lawmakers about civil rights legislation.
“The question is not whether we’re going to be in court, but whether we’re going to be in court as defendants,” said Theodore Shaw, director-counsel and president of the LDF. “We’re playing a lot of defense these days.” That’s included being involved with the University of Michigan in last year’s Supreme Court case that upheld affirmative action by the slimmest of margins.
The LDF was officially created by the NAACP in 1940 as its tax-exempt arm, and separated from that organization entirely in 1957.
The NAACP had been eyeing the courts for civil rights redress for years, with attorney Charles Hamilton Houston coming on board in 1934. Houston, Harvard-trained and brilliant, brought in Marshall, who had been his student at Howard University. They decided the way to do away with segregation was to attack it case by case.
For example, in 1938, they won a case in which the Supreme Court ruled against state laws requiring black graduate students to study out of state rather than be admitted to all-white state schools. In 1940, a federal appeals court ordered that black and white teachers be paid the same.
The LDF’s case list following the Brown ruling reads like a history of civil rights in America.
The group defended Martin Luther King Jr. when he was arrested in 1963 for demonstrating without a permit in Birmingham, Ala. (While awaiting trial, King wrote his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”). In 1964, the LDF won a case in which the Supreme Court stuck down laws criminalizing interracial relationships. In 1965, it was a court order obtained by the LDF that allowed King to march from Selma to Montgomery.