who was the lawyer who led the naacp and its legal battle against segregation?

by Ms. Maymie Pouros II 8 min read

Charles Hamilton Houston

Who was involved in the legal strategy of the NAACP?

Mar 22, 2022 · In 1936, the NAACP hired Charles H. Houston to lead a campaign that would challenge segregation in the courts. At that time Houston was the dean of Howard University's …

How did the NAACP fight against segregated education?

Often referred to as the “Moses of the civil rights movement,” Houston was the architect and chief strategist of the NAACP’s legal campaign to end segregation. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court …

How did the NAACP help the Civil Rights Movement?

Mar 21, 1981 · Pioneering civil-rights attorney Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), successfully argued the case before the court. Marshall, …

How did the NAACP Fight for anti-lynching legislation?

NAACP v. Jim Crow The Legal Strategy That Brought Down "Separate but Equal" by Toppling School Segregation By Robert J. Cottrol, Raymond T. Diamond, and Leland B. Ware The …

Who was the lead lawyer for the naacp?

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.

Who was the lead lawyer for the naacp in the Brown case?

The U.S. Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, was bundled with four related cases and a decision was rendered on May 17, 1954. Three lawyers, Thurgood Marshall (center), chief counsel for the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund and lead attorney on the Briggs case, with George E. C. Hayes (left) and James M.

Who was a lawyer who worked for the naacp on civil rights cases & the first African American Supreme Court justice?

Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993) was an American lawyer and civil rights activist who served as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from October 1967 until October 1991. Marshall was the U.S. Supreme Court's first African American justice.

Who was the lawyer who represented Brown?

John Scott was a Topeka, KS, based lawyer who initially began the Brown case on behalf of Oliver Brown and the other litigants. Chief Justice Earl Warren, who was born in 1891, secured a unanimous decision in Brown v.Jun 8, 2021

Who was the first black person on the Supreme Court?

Justice Thurgood Marshall
Justice Thurgood Marshall: First African American Supreme Court Justice. On June 13, 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated distinguished civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall to be the first African American justice to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States.

What Court cases did the naacp win?

The NAACP's long battle against de jure segregation culminated in the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, which overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine.

Who put Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court?

President Johnson
President Johnson nominated Marshall in June 1967 to replace the retiring Justice Tom Clark, who left the Court after his son, Ramsey Clark, became Attorney General.Aug 30, 2021

Who was the first female Supreme Court justice?

Sandra Day O'Connor
Sandra Day O'Connor, nĂŠe Sandra Day, (born March 26, 1930, El Paso, Texas, U.S.), associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1981 to 2006. She was the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court.Mar 22, 2022

What was the NAACP's role in the Civil Rights Movement?

The NAACP played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. One of the organization’s key victories was the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed segregation in public schools.

Who was the first black president of the NAACP?

A white lawyer, Moorfield Storey, became the NAACP’s first president. Du Bois, the only Black person on the initial leadership team, served as director of publications and research. In 1910, Du Bois started The Crisis, which became the leading publication for Black writers; it remains in print today.

When was the NAACP founded?

Sources. The NAACP or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was established in 1909 and is America’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. It was formed in New York City by white and Black activists, partially in response to the ongoing violence against African Americans around the country.

What is the NAACP?

The NAACP or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was established in 1909 and is America’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. It was formed in New York City by white and Black activists, partially in response to the ongoing violence against African Americans around the country. In the NAACP’s early decades, its anti-lynching campaign was central to its agenda. During the civil rights era in the 1950s and 1960s, the group won major legal victories, and today the NAACP has more than 2,200 branches and some half a million members worldwide.

How many branches does the NAACP have?

During the civil rights era in the 1950s and 1960s, the group won major legal victories, and today the NAACP has more than 2,200 branches and some half a million members worldwide.

What was the NAACP's goal?

The NAACP’s Early Decades. Since its inception, the NAACP has worked to achieve its goals through the judicial system, lobbying and peaceful protests. In 1910, Oklahoma passed a constitutional amendment allowing people whose grandfathers had been eligible to vote in 1866 to register without passing a literacy test.

Why did the NAACP march in 1917?

In 1917, some 10,000 people in New York City participated in an NAACP-organized silent march to protest lynchings and other violence against Black people. The march was one of the first mass demonstrations in America against racial violence.

Who was the lead plaintiff in the NAACP lawsuit?

The lead plaintiff, Oliver Brown, was not a prominent figure in the local NAACP.

Who was the leader of the NAACP?

Diamond, and Leland B. Ware. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed in 1909 to fight Jim Crow, 20th-century America's experience with petty and not so petty apartheid. Under the leadership of W.E.B. Du Bois, the NAACP would take the bully pulpit to push for the abolition ...

What was the NAACP's goal?

Du Bois, the NAACP would take the bully pulpit to push for the abolition of segregation and racial caste distinctions, and it would fight for open and equal access to education and employment for Negroes. It would crusade against lynching and offer legal assistance to defend black people mistreated in criminal court. Over time, the NAACP would become the nation's premier civil rights organization. It would do so in large part because the NAACP early on recognized that the courts, despite their racial conservatism, were a potentially potent weapon in the battle for racial change.

What was the NAACP?

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed in 1909 to fight Jim Crow, 20th-century America's experience with petty and not so petty apartheid. Under the leadership of W.E.B. Du Bois, the NAACP would take the bully pulpit to push for the abolition of segregation and racial caste distinctions, ...

What was the name of the law school that Sweatt applied to?

Sweatt was a letter carrier who lived in Texas. In 1946 he applied to the all-white law school at the University of Texas. He was immediately rejected. The rejection letter informed him that he could request that the state of Texas establish a law school for Negroes. The NAACP filed suit in state court on Sweatt's behalf. The results were familiar. The trial court opinion stated that state officials were under no obligation to admit him to the University of Texas. The opinion allowed state officials six months to establish a black law school. Just before the six months were up, the state presented the trial court with evidence that it had established the Jim Crow law school. The school was housed in two rented rooms in Houston. Administratively, the school was part of Prairie View University, a Texas state university for Negroes, some 40 miles away. The faculty consisted of two part-time instructors. There was no library.

Where did the Clarendon case originate?

The first case originated in Clarendon County, S .C. That county maintained a system of grossly unequal segregated schools. In the 1949–1950 academic year, there were 6,531 black students attending 61 schools. The annual expenditures for these schools were $194,575. There were 2,375 white students attending 12 schools. The annual expenditures for these schools were $673,850. Per pupil expenditures of public funds came to $43 per capita for black children and $179 per capita for white children. The average white schoolteacher earned two-thirds more than the average black one; and in contrast to its treatment of white children, the school board could not be troubled to provide a single bus for the transportation of black children. Thurgood Marshall took the case on behalf of 20 plaintiffs.

Who was the lead plaintiff in the desegregation case?

The lead plaintiff, Oliver Brown, was not a prominent figure in the local NAACP. He was an ordinary citizen who was angered that his daughter had to travel each day past a modern, fully equipped white school to a black school housed in a deteriorated building. There were several plaintiffs, but Oliver Brown 's name came first alphabetically, and as a result, when the case was filed in the federal court on February 14, 1951, the case bore his name. Robert Carter and Jack Greenberg were the NAACP's point men for Brown.

What was the NAACP's response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision?

Board of Education decision, which overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine . Former NAACP Branch Secretary Rosa Parks’ refusal to yield her seat to a white man sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the modern civil rights movement. In response to the Brown decision, Southern states launched a variety of tactics to evade school desegregation, while the NAACP countered aggressively in the courts for enforcement. The resistance to Brown peaked in 1957–58 during the crisis at Little Rock Arkansas’s Central High School. The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups targeted NAACP officials for assassination and tried to ban the NAACP from operating in the South. However, NAACP membership grew, particularly in the South. NAACP Youth Council chapters staged sit-in demonstrations at lunch counters to protest segregation. The NAACP was instrumental in organizing the 1963 March on Washington, the largest mass protest for civil rights. The following year, the NAACP joined the Council of Federated Organizations to launch Mississippi Freedom Summer, a massive project that assembled hundreds of volunteers to participate in voter registration and education. The NAACP-led Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a coalition of civil rights organizations, spearheaded the drive to win passage of the major civil rights legislation of the era: the Civil Rights Act of 1957; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

What was the goal of the NAACP in 1953?

In 1953 the NAACP initiated the “Fight for Freedom” campaign with the goal of abolishing segregation and discrimination by 1963, the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The NAACP vowed to raise one million dollars annually through1963 to fund the campaign. The concept recalls the Lincoln Day “Call” that began the NAACP. The NAACP has affirmed this connection to Abraham Lincoln throughout its history with annual Lincoln Day celebrations, related events, and programs which evoke Lincoln’s basic ideas of freedom and human brotherhood. The NAACP adopted “Fight For Freedom” as a motto.

Who was Clarence Mitchell?

Baltimore native Clarence Mitchell (1911–1984) attended Lincoln University and the University of Maryland Law School. He began his career as a reporter. During World War II he served on the War Manpower Commission and the Fair Employment Practices Committee. In 1946 Mitchell joined the NAACP as its first labor secretary. He served concurrently as director of the NAACP Washington Bureau, the NAACP’s chief lobbyist, and legislative chairman of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights from 1950 to 1978. Mitchell waged a tireless campaign on Capitol Hill to secure the passage of a comprehensive series of civil rights laws: the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the 1960 Civil Rights Act, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. His invincible determination won him the accolade of “101st U.S. Senator.”

Who was Herbert Hill?

He then worked as an organizer for the United Steelworkers before joining the NAACP staff in 1948. He was named labor secretary in 1951. In this capacity, he filed hundreds of lawsuits against labor unions and industries that refused integration or fair employment practices. He also used picket lines and mass demonstrations as weapons. Recognized as a major authority on race and labor, Hill testified frequently on Capitol Hill and served as a consultant for the United Nations and the State of Israel. He left the NAACP in 1977 to accept a joint professorship in Afro-American studies and industrial relations at the University of Wisconsin, from which he retired in 1997.

Who was Thurgood Marshall's legal assistant?

Thurgood Marshall hired Robert L. Carter (b. 1917) as a legal assistant at the Inc. Fund in 1944 and promoted him to assistant counsel in 1945. Carter graduated from Lincoln University and Howard Law School, and earned a Master of Law degree from Columbia University. He helped prepare briefs in the McLaurin and Sweatt cases, and argued McLaurin in Oklahoma and before the Supreme Court. Carter later became Marshall’s key aide in the Brown v. Board of Education case. He recommended using social science research to prove the negative effects of racial segregation, which became a crucial factor in the Brown decision. He also wrote the brief for the Brown case and delivered the argument before the Supreme Court. He served as the NAACP’s General Counsel from 1956 to 1968. In 1972 President Nixon appointed Carter to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, where he still presides as judge.

Who reads the Brown case?

Chief Justice Earl Warren’ s reading copy of Brown is annotated in his hand. Warren announced the opinion in the names of each justice, an unprecedented occurrence. The drama was heightened by the widespread prediction that the Court would be divided on the issue. Warren reminded himself to emphasize the decision’s unanimity with a marginal notation, “unanimously,” which departed from the printed reading copy to declare, “Therefore, we unanimously hold. . . .” In his memoirs, Warren recalled the moment with genuine warmth: “When the word ‘unanimously’ was spoken, a wave of emotion swept the room; no words or intentional movement, yet a distinct emotional manifestation that defies description.”#N#“Unanimously” was not incorporated into the published version of the opinion, and thus exists only in this manuscript.

When was Brown v. Board of Education reheared?

The Supreme Court bundled Brown v. Board of Education with four related cases and scheduled a hearing for December 9, 1952. A rehearing was convened on December 7, 1953 and a decision rendered on May 17, 1954. Three lawyers, Thurgood Marshall (center), chief counsel for the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund and lead attorney on the Briggs case, with George E. C. Hayes (left) and James M. Nabrit (right), attorneys for the Bolling case, are shown standing on the steps of the Supreme Court congratulating each other after the Court’s decision declaring segregation unconstitutional.

Who was the NAACP assistant secretary?

In 1918, Walter White, NAACP Assistant Secretary, initially joined NAACP as an investigator . His fair skin and straight hair made him effective in conducting investigations of lynchings and race riots in the South. He could "pass" and talk to whites but identified as Black. Through 1927, White would investigate 41 lynchings.

What did the NAACP do in the 1930s?

NAACP continued to push for federal anti-lynching legislation into the 1930s. National lynching rates declined in the 1930s, a trend that NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White attributed to anti-lynching activism, shifts in public opinion, and the Great Migration.

What was the purpose of the Lynchings?

Lynchings were violent public acts that white people used to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in the South.

Why were black people lynched?

Hundreds of Black people were lynched based on accusations of other crimes, including murder, arson, robbery, and vagrancy.

How did the NAACP fight lynching?

How NAACP fought lynching. As Black Americans fled the South to escape the terror of lynchings , a historic event known as the Great Migration, people began to oppose lynchings in a number of ways. They conducted grassroots activism, such as boycotting white businesses.

Who was the anti-lynching crusader?

Anti-lynching crusaders like Ida B. Wells composed newspaper columns to criticize the atrocities of lynching. And several important civil rights organizations — including NAACP — emerged during this time to combat racial violence. NAACP led a courageous battle against lynching.

Who killed Lucy Fryer?

Washington was a 17-year-old Black teen lynched in Waco, Texas, by a white mob that accused him of killing Lucy Fryer, a white woman. Du Bois was able to turn postcards of Washington 's murder against their creators to energize the anti-lynching movement.