The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in 1909 as an organization dedicated to lobbying, political education, and legal action to alter the status of African‐Americans. In its early years the NAACP had a small paid staff that recruited members, published reports and a magazine, and lobbied government officials. The NAACP relied on volunteer attorneys to bring legal challenges to racial segregation, the most notable of which was Buchanan v. Warley (1917), which struck down residential segregation ordinances (see Segregation, De Jure).
In the 1920s the NAACP, aided by a grant from a liberal foundation, began to develop plans for a more systematic legal challenge to segregation. After Nathan Margold, a young white lawyer, outlined theories to challenge residential segregation (see Housing Discrimination) and segregation in public education, the NAACP hired Charles Hamilton Houston, the dean of the Howard Law School, as its first full‐time legal staff member. Houston began lawsuits to compel southern universities to admit African‐Americans to their graduate and professional schools and to equalize the salaries of black and white teachers in public schools. This campaign had its first success in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), which held that states either had to admit African‐Americans to professional schools or create segregated professional schools, ordinarily a course that would be too expensive.
To preserve the NAACP's ability to obtain tax‐exempt donations to support its legal and educational work while it continued to pursue political lobbying, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) was incorporated as a separate group in 1939. Houston hired Thurgood Marshall to assist him, and Marshall took over as director of the Legal Defense Fund in 1939. From 1945 to 1954 the LDF's legal campaign developed a sustained assault on segregation in education, initially expanding the Gaines decision by obtaining a decision from the Supreme Court that segregated professional facilities had to be equal to white ones in ways that were essentially impossible to reproduce (Sweatt v. Painter, 1950). Throughout this period, and until the 1960s, the legal staff was quite small, rarely exceeding seven attorneys.
After the success in Sweatt, the Legal Defense Fund turned its attention to segregation in elementary and secondary education and began the lawsuits that resulted in the desegregation decisions of 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education; Bolling v. Sharpe). For about a decade after Brown, the Legal Defense Fund concentrated on efforts to defend itself against attempts by southern legislatures to keep it from operating (for example, by charging it with unethical practices in soliciting clients, while attempting to compel school boards to comply with the desegregation decision). In 1963 the Supreme Court held that the Legal Defense Fund's activities in supporting litigation were protected by the First Amendment (*NAACP v. Button, 1963).
A further formal separation between the NAACP and the LDF occurred in 1954 when the boards of directors of the two groups became completely separate. For most of this period, the groups shared office space and maintained close working relations. In 1956, however, as a result of personality disagreements and policy differences over how to pursue desegregation, relations between the groups became strained. Ultimately the NAACP added its own legal staff, headed by Robert Carter, which aggressively pursued desegregation litigation in the North, while the Legal Defense Fund sought to implement desegregation in the South.
Thurgood Marshall left the Legal Defense Fund in 1961 to accept an appointment as a federal judge. He was replaced by Jack Greenberg. In the 1960s the Legal Defense Fund provided legal support for African‐Americans prosecuted during the sit‐in demonstrations. After enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the LDF developed a substantial litigation campaign to eliminate racial discrimination in employment. Motivated by concern that the death penalty was administered in ways that amounted to discrimination against African‐Americans, the Legal Defense Fund also challenged capital punishment. Although the death penalty campaign achieved a temporary victory in Furman v. Georgia (1972) and a more permanent one with respect to the imposition of the death penalty for rape, which had been a particular concern for African‐Americans (Coker v. Georgia, 1977), changes in the composition of the Supreme Court ultimately led to the reinstitution of capital punishment (see Race Discrimination and the Death Penalty).
See also Civil Rights Movement; Race and Racism.
Bibliography
- Richard Kluger, Simple Justice (1975).
- Mark Tushnet, The NAACP's Legal Strategy against Segregated Education, 1925–1950 (1987)
— Mark V. Tushnet
