The first African American admitted to the Delaware bar, Louis Redding was part of the NAACP legal team that challenged school segregation. As the first white attorney for the NAACP, Jack Greenberg helped to argue Brown v.
Harold Boulware served as the chief counsel for the South Carolina NAACP chapter and was instrumental in the Briggs case. Instrumental in the Davis case, Robinson went on to become the first African-American appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals. After working with Charles H. Houston, Shores went on to argue the Lucy v.
Frank Daniel Reeves. Frank D. Reeves, who was born in 1916, served as an attorney for the plaintiffs in the Brown v. Board decisions of 1954, and 1955 (Brown II). Mr. Reeves was the first African American appointed to the District of Columbia Board of Commissioners, although he declined the position.
Carter was part of the legal team that developed the NAACP’s strategy for ending segregation. Harold Boulware served as the chief counsel for the South Carolina NAACP chapter and was instrumental in the Briggs case. Instrumental in the Davis case, Robinson went on to become the first African-American appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals.
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. Nabrit (right), attorneys for the Bolling case, are shown standing on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court congratulating each other after the Court’s decision declaring segregation unconstitutional.
Attorneys for Brown v. Board of Education, May 17, 1954
Known among World leaders, presidents, celebrities, and academicians alike for his trademark activism, intellectual discipline, and masterful oratory, Dr. Amos C. Brown is a legend in his own time. Tutored by Medgar Evers, Benjamin Mays, Samuel Williams, J. Pious Barbour, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Known among World leaders, presidents, celebrities, and academicians alike for his trademark activism, intellectual discipline, and masterful oratory, Dr. Amos C. Brown is a legend in his own time. Tutored by Medgar Evers, Benjamin Mays, Samuel Williams, J. Pious Barbour, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
John Scott. John Scott was a Topeka, KS, based lawyer who initially began the Brown case on behalf of Oliver Brown and the other litigants. Earl Warren. Chief Justice Earl Warren, who was born in 1891, secured a unanimous decision in Brown v.
Their case eventually became one of five included in the landmark 1954 case, Brown v. Board of Education. Spottswood W. Robinson, III, who was born in 1916, taught law at Howard University, in Washington, DC, and eventually became dean of the school. He made his mark on the history of Brown v.
Ferguson ruling of the United States Supreme Court as precedent. The plaintiffs claimed that the "separate but equal" ruling violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. In 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Brown v.
Ethel Louise Belton#N#Ethel Belton and six other adults filed suit on behalf of eight Black children against Francis B. Gebhart and 12 others (both individuals and state education agencies) in the case Belton v. Gebhart. The plaintiffs sued the state for denying to the children admission to certain public schools because of color or ancestry. The Belton case was joined with another very similar Delaware case, Bulah v. Gebhart, and both would ultimately join four other NAACP cases in the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Belton was born in 1937 and died in 1981.
Born in 1908, Thurgood Marshall served as lead attorney for the plaintiffs in Briggs v. Elliott. From 1930 to 1933, Marshall attended Howard University Law School and came under the immediate influence of the school’s new dean, Charles Hamilton Houston. Marshall, who also served as lead counsel in the Brown v.
This grouping of cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, the District of Columbia, and Delaware was significant because it represented school segregation as a national issue, not just a southern one. Each case was brought on the behalf of elementary school children, involving all-Black schools that were inferior to white schools.
C. Melvin Sharpe , acting as President of the Board of Education of the District of Columbia from 1948 to 1957, was named as the lead defendant in the case Bolling v. Sharpe. Earl Warren. Chief Justice Earl Warren, who was born in 1891, secured a unanimous decision in Brown v.
At the time, McKinley Burnett, president of the local NAACP, was organizing the Topeka case. He successfully enlisted a class of 13 local plaintiffs including Rev. Brown. Linda Brown in classroom. Rev. Brown had attempted to enroll his young daughter in the all-white Sumner Elementary School. When the school refused to enroll Linda, she was ...
It was not easy for her or her family. But her sacrifice broke barriers and changed the meaning of equality in this country. Brown v. Board is the most important, transformational Supreme Court decision of the 20th century.”. Brown Thompson was born on February 20, 1943, in Topeka, Kansas.
Favorable Supreme Court rulings in a series of civil rights cases litigated by LDF, including Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada , Sipuel v. Oklahoma State Regents , McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents , and Sweatt v. Painter — a 1950 case that ruled that “separate and equal” law schools for Blacks could not provide a legal education “equal” to that available to white students — secured Brown’s success. These cases along with Justice John Marshall Harlan’s stirring dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson — a shameful precedent from 1896 that upheld the constitutionality of the “separate but equal” doctrine and gave rise to Jim Crow laws across the South — provided the legal foundation LDF attorneys needed to bring down segregation in public elementary and secondary schools throughout the country.
Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that helped bring an end to racial segregation in America’s public schools. The bravery and resilience of the Brown family and the one dozen other African-American families who participated in the suit transformed the trajectory of this country and ushered in the end of racial segregation in all facets of American society. Ms. Brown Thompson died March 25, 2018, at age 75, in Topeka, Kansas.
Ferguson — a shameful precedent from 1896 that upheld the constitutionality of the “separate but equal” doctrine and gave rise to Jim Crow laws across the South — provided the legal foundation LDF attorneys needed to bring down segregation in public elementary and secondary schools throughout the country.
These cases along with Justice John Marshall Harlan’s stirring dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson — a shameful precedent from 1896 that upheld ...
In LDF’s Supreme Court brief, experts warned that racial segregation and subordination taught white children to “gain personal status in an unrealistic and non-adaptive way” and caused them to suffer from “confusion, conflict [and] moral cynicism.”.
In 1935 Marshall became chief counsel to the Baltimore branch of the NAACP, and shortly thereafter he joined Charles Hamilton Houston in the NAACP’s New York office. For the next twenty years, the NAACP engaged in legal challenges that ultimately developed into a significant body of civil rights law. Many of the civil rights cases litigated by the NAACP during this period are studied in U.S. law schools in the early twenty-first century. As counsel for the NAACP, Marshall took thirty-two cases to the Supreme Court, and he was victorious in twenty-nine of them.
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 secondary education. Legalized racial discrimination (also known as Jim Crow laws) prohibited black and white people from using the same water fountains, attending the same public schools, and having access to the same public accommodations, including restaurants, public libraries, and buses.
Painter, Herman Sweatt, a black American, was denied admission to the University of Texas Law School on the grounds that substantially equivalent facilities were offered by a law school open only to blacks (thus meeting the requirements of the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson). At the time the plaintiff first applied to the University of Texas, there was no law school in Texas that admitted blacks. The Texas trial court, instead of granting the plaintiff a writ of mandamus (a court order from a superior court to a lower or trial court to comply with a legal command in order to safeguard an individual’s legal interest), postponed the trial for six months, allowing the state time to create a law school only for blacks. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed a trial court opinion that the newly established state law school for black Americans met the “separate but equal” judicial doctrine prevailing after Plessy v. Ferguson.
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
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.
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?
From the 1920s through the 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) pushed the country toward racial equality through organized protests and highly strategic law suits that challenged the racist laws that promoted discrimination against blacks. The organization was founded in 1909, and from its inception it was devoted to the fight against legalized racial discrimination.
At the same time, NAACP members were subject to harassment and violence.
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.
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.
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.
Today, the NAACP is focused on such issues as inequality in jobs, education, health care and the criminal justice system, as well as protecting voting rights.
During this era, the NAACP also successfully lobbied for the passage of landmark legislation including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, barring racial discrimination in voting.
In its charter, the NAACP promised to champion equal rights and eliminate racial prejudice, and to “advance the interest of colored citizens” in regard to voting rights, legal justice and educational and employment opportunities.