Now in Sweatt, the NAACP was arguing that segregation could not meet that high standard if it was irrational to begin with. Even if one suspects that a significant portion of the responses to social surveys should be discounted as people telling the pollsters the "right" or "socially acceptable" answer, the fact that tolerance for interracial marriage or transracial adoption has become the "right" answer in the last half century itself reflects a profound cultural change. How Did Thurgood Marshall Help the NAACP? Morrow Research Professor of Law and adjunct professor of African Diaspora studies at Tulane University. The Murray court noted that if Murray were barred from the University of Maryland's law school, he would miss the benefits of a state law school education, specifically gaining a familiarity with the courts of the state in which he intended to practice law. Learn more about the history of the landmark case, key players, and how Brown vs. Board shaped our nation. Murray, the court noted, had been "denied admission on the sole ground of his color." In 1931, the NAACP's first staff attorney, Nathan Margold, outlined a legal strategy to challenge school segregation. The NAACP also benefited from supporting amicus briefs filed by the American Federation of Teachers, the Committee of Law Teachers Against Segregation in Legal Education, the American Veterans Committee, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the Japanese American Citizens League, and the American Civil Liberties Union. LULAC After a ten-year hiatus, Du Bois came back to NAACP as the director of special research from 1944 to 1948. Chief Justice Earl Warren read the opinion for a unanimous Court. Death Row USA: Death Penalty Cases and Statistics by State. In Sweatt, the NAACP was no longer alone. But professional schools were another matter. Maryland was willing to provide a state-supported legal education for Murray, but not in Maryland and not at the state university. The national office was established in New York City in 1910 as well as a board of directors and president, Moorfield Storey, a white constitutional lawyer and former president of the American Bar Association. At the dawn of the 21st century, nearly half of the black population still lives in communities that are 90 percent or more black. Updated: March 29, 2023 | Original: October 29, 2009. Such an exclusion meant that the education at the separate law school for blacks was not the equal of the one received by whites. The Court had reiterated its frequent admonishment that it "will decide constitutional questions only when necessary to the disposition of the case, and that such decisions will be drawn as narrowly as possible." Not more than three weeks after the decision in Sweatt, two black graduate students were admitted to the University of Texas, and Heman Sweatt became the first black person to enroll at the law school. This is clear in the language of the appellate opinion. The entirely part-time faculty had no offices at the black school. Give me the doll that looks bad.4. After all, after nearly half a century, the equal side of separate but equal was finally coming into prominence. 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. Despite the relative affluence of its black community, Washington was as segregated as any city in the Deep South. Marshall and his associates knew they would have to choose their cases and their clients carefully. Racist demagogues were sure to charge that black and white children attending elementary and secondary schools together would lead to the dreaded scourge of race mixing. The second part of the argument was also based on the equal protection clause. Founded in 1909, it was at the center of nearly every battle for the rights and dignity of African Americans in the twentieth century. Give me the doll you like to play with.2. In 1929 he was named vice-dean and associate professor at the school. But the new NAACP position did not require the sacrifice of the strategy that had brought victory in Sweatt and the other cases. Two Richmond lawyers, Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson, served in that capacity. The organization received some criticism for its strategy of working through the judicial system and lawmakers to achieve its goals, rather than focusing on more direct methods of protest favored by other national civil rights groups. HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate. The NAACP means the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP challenged the law and won a legal victory in 1915 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Guinn v. United States that grandfather clauses were unconstitutional. It would crusade against lynching and offer legal assistance to defend black people mistreated in criminal court. Jurists were placed in a moral and ethical dilemma. The march was one of the first mass demonstrations in America against racial violence. Simply put, the Court was "unable to find substantial equality in the educational opportunities offered white and Negro law students by the State." NAACP. However Brown supporters and black leaders such as T.R.M. Shortly after Sweatt, Marshall, 43 other attorneys, and 14 branch and local NAACP presidents convened to develop the next phase of the legal strategy. Louisiana State University had been ordered by a three-judge federal panel to admit black students to the law school, an order only three months later summarily affirmed by the Supreme Court. Washington Post. Brown played an important role in challenging the system of caste and exclusion that had developed in American society. By August 1950, the University of Delaware was ordered to admit blacks to its undergraduate campus because of the "woefully inferior" opportunities otherwise available to them. In 1933, Charles Hamilton Houston succeeded Margold as the NAACP's chief attorney. Claymont offered several extracurricular activities that were not available at Howard. By the time of the trial, only 17 days after the scholarships became available, 380 African-American students had asked for applications, 113 had returned them, and there were still 12 more days during which completed applications would be accepted. This happened because the NAACP chose a strategy of litigation and, later, lobbying, that lost favor as African Americans and their allies turned to direct action as a strategy. Give me the doll that is a nice color. He was commissioned as a first lieutenant after attending a training camp for Negro officers in Des Moines, Iowa. He was the architect of the legal strategy that ended the countrys official policy of segregation and was the first Black U.S. Supreme Court Justice. If they were intellectually honest, they could not, on the basis of the extensive evidence presented, rule that segregated schools wereor could ever beequal. 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. Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window), Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window), Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window), Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window), Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window), https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/naacp. The key to the cases lay in the innovative use of expert testimony to establish the psychological harm that segregation inflicted on African-American schoolchildren. What was "more important" than those factors capable of measurement were "those qualities that are incapable of measurement, but which make for greatness in a law school. That is, he was qualified by any standard but one. Perhaps, but the physical facilities were substantially equal, and besides the new building for the white school could help explain the differences in per capita expenditures for white and black students. Did the school for white children offer an academic curriculum while the school for Negroes offered a vocational program? Relying heavily on the foundation developed in cases such as McLaurin and Sweatt, as well as the social science evidence presented by Dr. Clark and others, the Court held that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" (italics added). A white lawyer, Moorfield Storey, became the NAACPs first president. Because of these changes, the case was remanded to the trial court to determine if the new school was equal to the one for whites. In that event, two Black men being held in a Springfield jail for alleged crimes against white people were surreptitiously transferred to a jail in another city, spurring a white mob to burn down 40 homes in Springfields Black residential district, ransack local businesses and murder two Blacks. In 1962, Medgar Evers, the first NAACP field secretary in Mississippi, was assassinated outside his home in Jackson by a white supremacist. (back to article), The Decline of the Idea of CasteSetting the Stage for Brown v. BoardBy Robert J. Cottrol, Raymond T. Diamond, and Leland B. Ware, NAACP v. Jim CrowThe Legal Strategy That Brought Down "Separate but Equal" by Toppling School SegregationBy Robert J. Cottrol, Raymond T. Diamond, and Leland B. Ware, Teachers' Roles in Ending School Segregation. Thurgood Marshalls legacy lives on with the. And there was more. By the fall of 1950, the University of Maryland was forced by court order to open to blacks its graduate program in sociology. Marshall, who founded the LDF in 1940, won a number of other important civil rights cases involving issues such as voting rights and discriminatory housing practices. Marshall was born on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland, to William Marshall, railroad porter, who later worked on the staff of Gibson Island Club, a white-only country club and Norma Williams, a school teacher. How did naacp use litigation? Copyright 2023 NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. Thurgood Marshall was an influential leader of the civil rights movement whose tremendous legacy. It was clear that in the South, expenditures on black schools were significantly inferior on a per capita basis to those for white schools. The opinion allowed state officials six months to establish a black law school. Library of Congress. The state put no barriers in the way of higher education, for the University of Kansas had long been open to black people and so had Washburn University. It was the first major case for a young attorney who would succeed Charles Hamilton Houston as NAACP special counselThurgood Marshall. States were being prodded toward making some progress in the equalization of schools, libraries, and recreational and other facilities. The attorneys agreed to represent the students not in a case to equalize the facilities, but in a case to desegregate the schools. Immediately after graduation, Marshall opened a law office in Baltimore, and in the early 1930s, he represented the local NAACP chapter in a successful lawsuit that challenged the University of Maryland Law School over its segregation policy. The NAACPs initial goal was to funnel equal resources to black schools. Well, schools can't be expected to be identical; the schools were simply serving the different needs of their different constituencies. Anti-Lynching Legislation Renewed. The University of Maryland's law school was only open to whites. His application was rejected. When Houston became the NAACP's special counsel in 1933, he reexamined Margold's litigation strategy. The white law school had 16 full-time and three part-time faculty members and a student body of 850. lives on in the pursuit of racial justice. But there were far fewer graduate and professional programs and, therefore, fewer targets for a concentrated litigation effort. In all of these tangible factors, the Court found the University of Texas superior. The facts were somewhat different in each case, but the cases were all part of a coordinated strategy directed from the NAACP's headquarters in New York. The court did not condemn the scholarship program as a matter of law. It was clear to the court that to entirely deny blacks the opportunity for a state-sponsored legal education when whites were provided one would violate the formula laid down by Plessy, but that was not the issue here. 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. The organization was led from 1929 to 1955 by Walter White, a mixed-race journalist and activist who spearheaded the groups participation in the Scottsboro Boys trial, race riot investigations and anti-lynching campaigns. Surprisingly, even the occasional right-wing antigovernment militia will sometimes have a black member or two. Five of the seven movie theaters were relegated to whites only, and a sixth was for blacks; the seventh allowed both races, but blacks were consigned to the balcony. Second, it exposed the actual purpose of segregation, the perpetration of racial subordination. NAACP units throughout the country. The South Carolina and Kansas cases would also be joined by two separate cases that were filed in Delaware: Gebbart et al. Indeed that liberalization has spread and intensified. The school was housed in two rented rooms in Houston. In the 19491950 academic year, there were 6,531 black students attending 61 schools. Moreover, he continued, not only did segregated education produce negative effects, it also produced no positive effects. During the final decades of the 20th century, the NAACP experienced financial difficulties and some members charged that the organization lacked direction. The NAACP looked around for a strong plaintiff. The Supreme Court's decision in Sweatt was unanimous in Heman Sweatt's favor. But "out-of-wedlock births" returns only one . The Court found that it did, concluding that "to separate [black] children from others of similar age and qualifications generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in ways unlikely ever to be undone." If a case that made a frontal assault on Plessy lost, it would be a blow to morale, but the NAACP could resume its current campaign to litigate equal protection under the new standards that had developed in Sweatt. But if Brown should be seen as having a central importance in the fight against caste and racism, Brown also provides an important lesson in the law's limitations. But because the tangible facilities were not equal, Texas could not restrict Negroes to the Jim Crow school. The NAACP argued that there was no "valid legislative end" that justified racial segregation, that segregation was arbitrary and irrational. With this pronouncement, America stood at the dawn of a new era in race relations. NAACP lawyers brought the case in state court. Once again, note that the Court was examining two different law schools and that the justices were familiar with legal education; from their own experience they could see that the two schools were clearly not equal. It occupied a 14-acre site. By the time an appellate court could hear the appeal, the legislature had appropriated $100,000 toward the establishment of a law school at the newly established Texas State University for Negroes in Houston. The political opposition would be intense, perhaps fatal. 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. With respect to these factors, the University of Texas was the superior school, and the question, the Court said, was not even close. In 1951, Kenneth Clark, a social psychologist at the City College of New York, and his wife and fellow psychologist, Mamie Clark, developed a series of studies that examined the psychological effects of segregated and racially mixed schools on black children. 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