naacp attorney who led a legal challenge against segregation

What was the NAACP's Legal Strategy to challenge segregation?

 · A white lawyer, Moorfield Storey, became the NAACP’s first president. Du Bois, the only Black person on the initial leadership team, served …

Were all the NAACP Cases argued by the same legal team?

In 1931, the NAACP's first staff attorney, Nathan Margold, outlined a legal strategy to challenge school segregation. His strategy was part direct, part circumspect. Given the temper of the times, Margold recognized that it wouldn't do to attack school segregation under any …

What happened to the NAACP during the Civil Rights Movement?

In a study commissioned by the NAACP in the 1930s, Nathan Margold found that under segregation, the facilities provided for blacks were always separate, but never equal to those maintained for whites. This, Margold argued, violated the equality aspect of Plessy’s “separate but equal” principle.

Who is the Solicitor General for the NAACP?

 · SAN DIEGO— NAACP San Diego Branch and San Diego Tenants Union have declared victory in their long-standing legal battle against the San Diego Housing Commission. “For far too long, rental units in white, low-poverty San Diego neighborhoods have been inaccessible to Section 8 voucher holders – primarily Black and Brown families,” said ...

Which NAACP lawyer led a legal challenge against segregation?

Thurgood Marshall was a civil rights lawyer who used the courts to fight Jim Crow and dismantle segregation in the U.S. Marshall was a towering figure who became the nation's first Black United States Supreme Court Justice. He is best known for arguing the historic 1954 Brown v.

Who was the lead attorney who challenged segregation?

Thurgood Marshall Marshall was the key strategist in the effort to end racial segregation, in particular meticulously challenging Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court-sanctioned legal doctrine that called for “separate but equal” structures.

Who was the NAACP lawyer who argued Brown?

As the first white attorney for the NAACP, Jack Greenberg helped to argue Brown v. Board of Education at the U.S. Supreme Court level.

Who was Oliver Brown?

Oliver Brown, a minister in his local Topeka, KS, community, challenged Kansas's school segregation laws in the Supreme Court. Mr. Brown's 8-year-old daughter, Linda, was a Black girl attending fifth grade in the public schools in Topeka when she was denied admission into a white elementary school.

What was Charles Hamilton Houston famous for?

The first general counsel of NAACP, Charles Hamilton Houston exposed the hollowness of the "separate but equal" doctrine and paved the way for the Supreme Court ruling outlawing school segregation.

Who was the attorney lawyer that helped to win the case of Brown vs the Board of Education of Topeka in 1954?

Thurgood MarshallIn Brown v. Board of Education, the attorney for the plaintiffs was Thurgood Marshall. He later became, in 1967, the first African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Who was the Supreme Court chief justice who wrote the decision for Brown v. Board of Education?

Chief Justice Earl WarrenThe Supreme Court's opinion in the Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954 legally ended decades of racial segregation in America's public schools. Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling in the landmark civil rights case.

How did Thurgood Marshall end segregation?

After founding the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in 1940, Marshall became the key strategist in the effort to end racial segregation, in particular meticulously challenging Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court-sanctioned legal doctrine that called for “separate but equal” structures for white and Black people.

Who was the first NAACP staff attorney?

In 1931, the NAACP's first staff attorney, Nathan Margold, outlined a legal strategy to challenge school segregation. His strategy was part direct, part circumspect. Given the temper of the times, Margold recognized that it wouldn't do to attack school segregation under any and all circumstances.

What was the NAACP dealing with?

Professional schools offered a more tempting target: The NAACP was dealing with total exclusion; the state provided a law school or a medical school, but only for whites.

Who is Donald Murray?

The NAACP found one in Baltimore resident Donald Murray. Like Houston, Murray was a graduate of Amherst College, and , by any standard, qualified for admission to the University of Maryland Law School. That is, he was qualified by any standard but one. His application was rejected.

Why should the NAACP continue its efforts to create a Hobson's Choice for school districts?

For these reasons, Houston decided that while the NAACP should continue its efforts to create a Hobson's Choice for school districts by bringing facility and salary equalization suits, it should also add a new, perhaps more promising, focus: desegregation in graduate and professional schools. Segregation in graduate and professional education was as common in the South as segregation in elementary and secondary schools. But there were far fewer graduate and professional programs and, therefore, fewer targets for a concentrated litigation effort. A victory against a state's single law school or medical school would reverberate across the state.

Who succeeded Margold as the NAACP's chief attorney?

In 1933, Charles Hamilton Houston succeeded Margold as the NAACP's chief attorney. Houston was a man of extraordinary brilliance.

Why was the Brown case important?

The importance of Brown lay in its setting the nation's law on the path of rejecting the kind of racial exclusion that had made African Americans a people apart since before the nation's founding . The 1954 decision provided a foundation for later court decisions and legislative enactments that established a new set of norms concerning law and race. Before Brown, the Fourteenth Amendment notwithstanding, American law gave its sanction to a patent system of racial inequality. Brown began the process of withdrawing the law's sanction from the system of caste and caste-like distinctions that had been a part of American life from the beginning. Brown did not do it alone. The decision would become a catalyst for profound changes in legal norms. It was able to do so in large part because of the remarkable courage of ordinary men and women. That courage started with parents like Harry Briggs of South Carolina, Sarah Bulah of Delaware, and Oliver Brown of Kansas, who stood up for better lives for their children by challenging, through the Brown cases, the entrenched system of school segregation in their communities.

Is racism still a problem?

But that is only part of the story. Racism still exists. It is not hard to find. But it lacks the kind of official support that it had in generations past. It is not as overwhelming a part of American culture as it was throughout most of the 20th century, but still, reports of its total demise are woefully premature. Segregation continues. It has lessened to be sure, but African Americans remain the most segregated of the racial and ethnic groups in the United States, with the exception of Indians on reservations. At the dawn of the 21st century, nearly half of the black population still lives in communities that are 90 percent or more black. The legacy of slavery, caste, and racism is a poverty rate for black families that is roughly three times that for whites. The percentage of African-American children raised in female-headed, fatherless households has risen dramatically since the Brown decision: More than 50 percent of all African-American children are raised in such families. The percentage of black children born out of wedlock approaches 70 percent.

How did the NAACP fight segregation?

The NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) adopted the strategy of using legal cases to promote civil rights and seek equality, dignity, and self-respect for black Americans. The NAACP adopted strategies that promoted civil rights as a response to the role legal racism played in restricting the educational and political opportunities of black Americans, and the nation’s understanding of what it means to discriminate on the basis of race would shift in response to the legal challenges raised by the NAACP. The nation’s courts, and ultimately Congress, were persuaded to reorient the nation toward genuinely supporting the political participation and education for all Americans

What was the NAACP's legal strategy?

The NAACP adopted a legal strategy based upon the use of the test case. This is a strategy involving the use of a case or controversy to establish a point of law as precedent to be relied upon in future cases. The early twentieth-century civil rights lawyers focused upon convincing the courts that no matter how concealed they were, discriminatory laws based on race could not blind the courts to the role of the state in legal racism. State laws imposing racial injustice therefore could, and should, be challenged on constitutional grounds.

What did the Supreme Court of Missouri do to the Shelleys?

The Supreme Court of Missouri reversed this decision and directed the trial court to grant relief for the neighbors, holding that the agreement was legal and that enforcement of its provisions violated no rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Notably, at the time the court rendered its decision, the Shelleys were occupying the property.

What amendments did Texas have to allow the state to vote on race?

The State of Texas, by its own constitution and state laws, provided that every person qualified by residence in the district or county “shall be deemed a qualified elector.” The Supreme Court reasoned that whereas a state was free to conduct elections and limit electorate participation, the Fourteenth Amendment forbade the states from abridging the right to vote on account of race. As such, the Democratic Party of Texas, although it was a voluntary organization freely able to select its own membership, could not legally limit participation in the party primary to whites.

What was the NAACP's success?

One of the hallmarks of the NAACP’s success up until 1954 was the careful selection of test cases. The victory in Brown v. Board of Education, and in various cases that preceded it, illustrates how the law may be used to work toward social change and equal justice. This point, however, should not overwhelm the fact that after a half century, the promise of Brown v. Board of Education is still subject to legal controversy. In 1992, for example, in the case of United States v. Fordice, the U.S. Department of Justice persuaded the Supreme Court that two southern states, Alabama and Mississippi, had not yet complied with the Court’s direction in Brown to dismantle all systems of legal segregation in higher education.

What was the significance of Brown v. Board of Education?

On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, declared that “in the field of public education the doctrine of separate but equal” has no place in America, thus affirming that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. The Court squarely held that racial segregation in public schools violates the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees equal protection of the law, and the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, which guarantees due process. This case overturned a nineteenth-century legal doctrine that disregarded the pernicious effects of discrimination against black Americans. Thus, the case marked a major turning point in the struggle for civil rights. Given the history of Jim Crow, how did the Supreme Court come to issue such a groundbreaking decision? Why would the nation’s highest court depart from its prior decisions approving legal racial segregation? Of course, the right question is: How did the NAACP achieve its victory?

What was the Jim Crow law?

Jim Crow laws restricted the educational opportunities of black Americans by requiring racially segregated elementary, secondary, and undergraduate education. The NAACP’s challenge against unequal educational opportunities is most famously illustrated by the case known as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas. This landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws permitting government support of racial segregation in public schools.

Who was the leader of the NAACP?

The most significant of these battles were fought and won under the leadership of Charles Hamilton Houston and his student and protégée, Thurgood Marshall.

What did Thurgood Marshall do for the NAACP?

When Thurgood Marshall succeeded Houston as NAACP’s Special Counsel, he continued the Association’s legal campaign. During the mid-1940s, in Smith v. Allwright, Marshall successfully challenged “white primaries,” which prevented African Americans from voting in several southern states. In Morgan v. Virginia (1946), Marshall won a case in which the Supreme Court struck down a state law that enforced segregation on buses and trains that were interstate carriers. In 1948, Marshall and other cooperating attorneys won an important victory in Shelley v Kraemer, which ended the enforcement of racially restrictive covenants, a practice that barred blacks from purchasing homes in white neighborhoods. In 1950, Marshall won cases that struck down Texas and Oklahoma laws requiring segregated graduate schools in Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma. In those cases, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court held that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment required those states to admit black students to their graduate and professional schools.

What was the significance of the Brown vs Board of Education case?

Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. In this landmark decision, the Supreme Court held that segregation in public education violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Brown consisted of six separate cases in five jurisdictions; Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, the District of Columbia and Delaware. These cases are remembered as “Brown” because Oliver Brown was one of several plaintiffs in the Kansas case whose name appeared first in the court filings. He was represented at the trial and in the Supreme Court by NAACP attorney Robert Carter, who developed the innovative strategy of using the testimony of social scientists and other experts to demonstrate the psychological injuries that segregation inflicted on African American school children.

What was the Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson?

In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, which established the “separate but equal” principle. In a study commissioned by the NAACP in the 1930s, Nathan Margold found that under segregation, the facilities provided for blacks were always separate, but never equal to those maintained for whites. This, Margold argued, violated the equality aspect of Plessy’s “separate but equal” principle. Margold proposed a series of lawsuits that would challenge the system.

What was the impact of the Brown decision on the civil rights movement?

The Brown decision inspired the marches and demonstrations of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. These wide-spread protests ultimately led to the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. During this period, the Association represented civil rights workers and fought to implement Brown in numerous desegregation cases across the nation. Cases were filed that successfully challenged discrimination in public accommodations, housing, employment, voting.

Is NAACP still challenging racial discrimination?

Today, NAACP attorneys are still challenging racial discrimination whether it appears in the guise of corporate hotel policies that discriminate against African-American college students, voting disenfranchisement during national presidential elections or state-sponsored symbols of white supremacy, such as the confederate battle flag. The NAACP’s Legal Department focuses on class actions and other cases of broad significance in areas including employment, education, housing, environmental justice, criminal law and voting, striving always, to advance the Association’s goals while remembering Charles Hamilton Houston’s admonition that “ [A] lawyer is either a social engineer or a parasite on society.”

The Right Leadership

• In 1930, Walter White became the NAACP’s national executive secretary. Under White’s leadership, which lasted until 1955, the NAACP began focusing its legal challenges on five areas: voting rights, housing discrimination, equality of due process, segregation in institutions of higher education in the South, and segregation in elementary and seconda...

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Brown v. Board of Education

Legal Strategies

Smith v. Allwright

Shelley v. Kraemer

Sweatt v. Painter

Bibliography