NAACP Legal Defense And Education Fund Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Incorporated (LDF) began as the legal department of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1940. The fund’s activities focus on four areas: education, voter protection, economic justice, and criminal justice. The LDF’s headquarters are located in New York City, and regional offices are in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, California. The LDF has been involved in more cases before the U.S. Supreme Court than any other organization, with the exception of the U.S. Department of Justice.

At its founding, the NAACP was under the leadership of civil rights attorney Charles Hamilton Houston. Houston was the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review and vice dean of Howard University Law School. He joined the NAACP as part-time counsel in 1934 and played a role in nearly every civil rights case before the Supreme Court for over 25 years. Houston’s plan to attack and defeat Jim Crow segregation was informed by his use of scholarly research about the damaging social and psychological effects of segregation on black children and showed the inherent inequality of the “separate but equal” doctrine. He designed a strategy of attacking segregation in law schools—forcing states to either create costly parallel law schools or integrate the existing ones. Houston sought to neutralize the age-old argument that allowing blacks to attend white institutions would lead to miscegenation or race mixing. His rationale was that by challenging segregation in graduate schools, the NAACP lawyers would bypass the inflammatory issue of miscegenation among young children. Houston’s group of lawyers, most of whom had been trained at Howard, included future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall. This group created precedents that ultimately led to the dismantling of de jure discrimination—laws enforcing racial segregation of public education facilities.

In 1938, Marshall succeeded Houston as NAACP special counsel; Houston returned to his Washington, D.C., law practice but remained counsel with the NAACP. Houston and Marshall were the architects of the LDF’s most famous case; Brown vs. Board of Education, Topeka (1954) the landmark case in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial segregation in public schools. In 1940, Marshall wrote the LDF charter and became its first director and chief counsel. The LDF became an independent organization in 1957.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the fund functioned as “the legal arm of the civil rights movement,” representing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Rosa Parks, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and local organizations whose activities included organizing sit-ins in North Carolina and Tennessee, the freedom rides to Alabama and Mississippi, and voter registration programs in the deep South.

In the aftermath of the Mississippi freedom summer of 1964 (during which civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Scherer, and James Chaney were murdered by local officers in Philadelphia, Mississippi), LDF opened a branch office in Jackson, which was led by Marian Wright, the first African American woman admitted to the Mississippi bar.

In 1961, President Kennedy appointed Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Marshall was succeeded by Assistant Counsel Jack Greenberg, who served alongside Marshall as cocounsel during Brown. During his tenure, Greenberg argued or oversaw groundbreaking cases, including Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education (1969), which rejected the ethic of “all deliberate speed” used to stall desegregation efforts; Griggs v. Duke Power (1971), a test case for the application of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act; and Furman v. Georgia (1972), a landmark case that forced a countrywide reevaluation of capital punishment sentencing.

Under Greenburg’s leadership, the LDF grew in size and resources, and the organization became involved in projects and litigation that broadened the scope of the LDF’s mandate. Greenberg resigned in 1984 to become a professor at Columbia Law School. Julius L. Chambers was named director-counsel. Chambers was LDF’s first intern and argued before the Supreme Court in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971), which led to federally mandated busing, helping integrate public schools across the country. Under Chambers’s leadership, the organization fought for civil rights legislation and affirmative action programs that began in the 1970s and 1980s.

LDF’s current priorities include challenging efforts to undermine affirmative action in higher education, battling the resegregation of public schools, protecting minority participation in the electoral process, pursuing the restoration of the voting rights of persons convicted of felonies, combating employment discrimination, seeking to bring justice to African Americans through fair jury selection practices and adequately funded defense systems for the indigent, and advocating for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

In 2003, the LDF represented African American and Latino student interveners in the Supreme Court case challenging the University of Michigan’s undergraduate admission affirmative action policy. Through LDF efforts, the Supreme Court’s ruling upheld the use of race in admissions policies at the University of Michigan Law School.

On May 1, 2004, Theodore Shaw became the fifth person to lead the organization in its sixty-four-year history. In July 2006, LDF filed a friend of the court brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit supporting Mumia Abu-Jamal’s claim of racial discrimination in the selection of jurors for his 1982 trial for the shooting death of a police officer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 2008, John Payton, a prominent civil rights attorney, was appointed LDF’s 6th director-counsel and president.

Bibliography:

Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, 396 U.S. 1218 (1969). Brown vs. Board of Education,Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
Clemetson, Lynette. “NAACP Legal Defense Fund Chief Retires.” The New York Times. January 16, 2004. nytimes.com.
Furman v. State of Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972).
Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971).
Lehrer, Jeremy. “Jack Greenberg: The Path of the Just.” Human Rights Magazine 24, no. 4 (Fall 1997): 18–24.
Linder, Douglas O., “Before Brown: Charles H. Houston and the Gaines Case: A Profile of Charles Hamilton Houston,” n.d., Trial Heroes. www. law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/trialheroes/heroeshome.html.
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971).

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