NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund

By: Robert Fay

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund

Major organization by which African Americans have, through law, achieved advances in civil rights in the twentieth century.

Created in 1939 by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) pioneered the field of public interest law, using the courts to gain and expand civil rights for African Americans when other avenues were blocked. The LDF was most visible during the 1940s, when its first director, future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, led it in the fight against legal segregation in the South. Its victories laid the groundwork for, and inspired participants in, the Civil Rights Movement. After overcoming legalized segregation in the courts, the LDF fought against the backlash of angry Southern state governments, several of which attempted to challenge the LDF's right to practice in their states. It also worked to strengthen and protect civil rights through the courts, by lobbying and providing scholarships to help African Americans attend law schools.

The LDF is most famous for arguing before the Supreme Court in 1954's landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, which ended legal segregation in public education in the United States. Brown marked the culmination of a long-term strategy to desegregate public education. Since shortly after the end of Reconstruction (about 1877), the South had been a one-party region, dominated by the Democratic Party and its white supremacist policies. Southern states were able to retain their segregationist policies because voters reelected the same representatives, who gained seniority and influence in both houses of Congress and blocked any federal civil rights legislation proposed. In response, the head of the NAACP's legal department, Charles Hamilton Houston, called the Moses of the Civil Rights Movement, developed a strategy in the mid-1930s that gained civil rights for blacks through the courts by indirectly attacking segregated public education. Houston believed that suing for greater African American participation in graduate schools would be less incendiary to segregationist whites than directly attacking public schools because the number of people attending graduate programs at that time was low.

Houston aimed to force Southern states to strengthen black public schools or eliminate them by underscoring the high cost of maintaining two “separate but equal” school systems. The strategy proved effective as early as 1938 when the NAACP's legal department successfully argued Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada. The Court determined in Gaines that Missouri's proposal to provide financial aid so that Lloyd Gaines could attend an out-of-state law school while denying him admission to an in-state whites-only law school was not equal treatment under the Constitution, violating the Fourteenth Amendment.

The NAACP, because it lobbied and issued propaganda, was ineligible for nonprofit status. Thus, its contributors could not deduct donations to the NAACP on their tax returns. In 1939 NAACP secretary Walter White attempted to attract contributors by creating a separate organization to administer the NAACP's charitable activities. On March 20, 1940, the NAACP created the LDF. Although the LDF was independent of the NAACP, the boards of directors for each organization were interlocked, and the LDF was largely guided by the same principles as the NAACP. Director-counsel Marshall, an NAACP lawyer who was a former student of Houston's, continued the NAACP legal department's strategy at the LDF. With Marshall executing Houston's strategy, the LDF won a number of graduate school desegregation cases, including Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma (1948), McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950), and Sweatt v. Painter (1950), all of which contributed to the final assault on segregated education, Brown.

Supreme Court justice Earl Warren, writing for the Court in Brown, worded the decision ambiguously, directing schools to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” Many Southern states emphasized the “deliberate” rather than the “speed,” maneuvering to slow integration. The LDF, therefore, began concentrating on ensuring that states complied with Brown, as in Cooper v. Aaron (1958), in which the Court ordered the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Supreme Court did not order complete school desegregation, however, until Green v. County School Board of New Kent County in 1968.

Brown ended one era for the LDF and it began another era, as African Americans began to demand equal access to all public facilities and equal treatment before the law, and the protest moved from the courthouses to the streets. The LDF, which had set the agenda in the fight against legal segregation, now yielded to civil rights activists and organizations, representing their members when they were arrested for participating in Sit-Ins, protest marches, and rallies.

In addition to attempting to block integration, Southern governments reacted to Brown by attacking the NAACP and the LDF, which it saw as the catalysts of all the activism and protest. According to Jack Greenberg, an LDF lawyer who became the organization's director after Thurgood Marshall left in 1961, almost every Southern state “passed laws and started legislative investigations … to put the NAACP and the LDF out of business.” South Carolina's legislature prohibited schools from hiring NAACP members. Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia all followed suit. Virginia's attempt to outlaw the NAACP ended in NAACP v. Button, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the NAACP had a First Amendment right to pursue public interest law.

Although the LDF, which fully separated from the NAACP because of threats to its tax-exempt status, is best known for its fight against school segregation, it also sought changes in other areas. In its earliest days, despite a small budget and the threat of violence posed by angry whites, LDF lawyers often traveled to small Southern towns to represent accused African Americans and to make certain they received fair trials. Many of those local cases became Supreme Court cases, such as Shepherd and Irvin v. Florida (1950), in which the LDF successfully argued that a defendant must be tried in a bias-free venue. In Smith v. Allwright (1944), the Supreme Court ruled that primary elections excluding blacks were unconstitutional. Morgan v. the Commonwealth of Virginia outlawed segregated accommodations on interstate buses. In Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), the Court ruled that covenants prohibiting blacks from purchasing homes were unconstitutional.

In recent decades the LDF's efforts continued in the courtroom and beyond. In court, it worked to end discrimination in employment, education, and in the criminal justice system. Among the issues it championed were fair employment practices, Affirmative Action in employment and education, and an end to the death penalty, which its studies indicated was applied disproportionately to black defendants. It has also formed and strengthened coalitions of civil rights groups to monitor the enforcement of civil rights laws, to report civil rights abuses, and to inform the American public about areas of need. The LDF, with its lasting and profound influence, has successfully pioneered a style of civil rights law that numerous agencies have emulated, as seen in agencies with the phrase “legal defense fund” in their titles.

See also Desegregation in the United States; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Segregation in the United States.

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