The rejection letter stated that the school "did not accept Negro students." Houston also made the law school library a depository for files on civil rights litigation from around the nation. Who Appointed Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court? A third of the city's Afro-American population was employed by the federal government. Elementary schools were segregated, as the junior high school had been until 1941 litigation ended the practice. Shortly after Sweatt, Marshall, 43 other attorneys, and 14 branch and local NAACP presidents convened to develop the next phase of the legal strategy. After a ten-year hiatus, Du Bois came back to NAACP as the director of special research from 1944 to 1948. Since one of the NAACP's litigation goals from 1935 through 1955 included bringing an end to Jim Crow laws, the organization focused on issues deemed . What was important was not so much the trial court decision as the record that was produced in the trial. To fail to do so is to ensure that America will forever remain a divided society., In particular, Marshall fervently dissented in cases in which the Supreme Court upheld death sentences; he wrote over 150 opinions dissenting from cases in which the Court refused to hear death penalty appeals. The NAACP looked around for a strong plaintiff. But in education, Plessy's separate but equal doctrine still remained the law of the land. 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. Two things were left to the NAACP. The Court had not explicitly overruled Plessy v. Ferguson; indeed, the Court was quite clear on that point. But the statute provided only $10,000 for scholarships: a paltry $200 each for up to 50 black students seeking a professional education out of state. The University of Maryland's law school was only open to whites. But the new NAACP position did not require the sacrifice of the strategy that had brought victory in Sweatt and the other cases. Robert J. Cottrol is Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law and professor of history and sociology at George Washington University. The NAACP also argued that racial segregation did not meet the more exacting standard that had been suggested by two cases decided by the Supreme Court during the Second World War. In 1929 he was named vice-dean and associate professor at the school. The strategy adopted by the NAACP to end segregation was B. arguing legal cases in court. The NAACP or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was established in 1909 and is Americas oldest and largest civil rights organization. These articles were especially adapted for American Educator by Robert J. Cottrol from Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture, and the Constitution, by Robert J. Cottrol, Raymond T. Diamond, and Leland B. Ware (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003) by permission of the publisher. In an interview published in 1992 in the American Bar Association Journal, Marshall wrote that Charlie Houston insisted that we be social engineers rather than lawyers, a mantra that he upheld and personified. Racial restrictions, even of the most damaging kind, might be upheld, though only under "the most rigid scrutiny." The state legislature had passed a statute in response to Murray's lawsuit. It was surrounded by factories and warehouses. Learn more about the history of the landmark case, key players, and how Brown vs. Board shaped our nation. Brown's importance in the history of American race relations is assured. I expect to die at 110, shot by a jealous husband. On the appointment, President Johnson later said that Marshalls nomination was the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place., As a Supreme Court Justice, he became increasingly dismayed and disappointed as the courts majority retreated from remedies he felt were necessary to address remnants of Jim Crow. Careful selection of the right plaintiff had paid off. NAACP lawyers brought the case in state court. The court was forced to confront the constitutional issue. In Korematsu, the Court stated that while "all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect [t]hat is not to say that all such restrictions are unconstitutional." Library of Congress. 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. Give me the doll you like to play with.2. Large numbers of white children attended the public schools. LEGAL STRATEGIES. Thurgood Marshalls legacy lives on with the. The group also has pushed for the removal of Confederate flags and statues from public property. Did the school for white children offer an academic curriculum while the school for Negroes offered a vocational program? They then made a series of commands. He established the first course in civil rights law taught at an American law school. The NAACPs founding members included white progressives Mary White Ovington, Henry Moskowitz, William English Walling and Oswald Garrison Villard, along with such African Americans as W.E.B. But it did order Donald Murray admitted to the University of Maryland's law school. Marshall won a series of court decisions that gradually struck down that doctrine, ultimately leading to. It got Donald Murray admitted to the University of Maryland. What strategy did the naacp use to end segregation? There were 2,375 white students attending 12 schools. An additional important point should be made. When Houston became the NAACP's special counsel in 1933, he reexamined Margold's litigation strategy. It examined the intangible characteristics of a legal education. In the fall of 1919 he entered Harvard Law School. (back to article), A law review is a student-edited journal that publishes articles by law professors, practicing lawyers, and students; a moot courtroom is a space for practicing oral arguments and holding mock trials. Southern white fundamentalist Protestant churches often have black parishioners. As it celebrates its centennial, the NAACP is reflecting on the progress made and the work still to be done. Those wartime experiences left an indelible impression on the young Houston, creating, as he indicated, a determination to strike back at racial oppression: "The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them. 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. When Marshall sat with Houston on Murray's case, Marshall must have taken no small amount of pleasure in attacking the Maryland law school's policy of discrimination. There was segregation, but it was not universal. This is clear in the language of the appellate opinion. Administratively, the school was part of Prairie View University, a Texas state university for Negroes, some 40 miles away. The importance of Brown lay in its setting the nation's law on the path of rejecting the kind of racial exclusion that had made African Americans a people apart since before the nation's founding. American attitudes toward race had changed since Plessy in 1896, and, in key areas, NAACP attorneys were striking blows against racial discrimination and gaining valuable legal experience along the way. But because the tangible facilities were not equal, Texas could not restrict Negroes to the Jim Crow school. 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. As a result of class divisions within the African-American community, Gardner's group formed separately from the school's PTA, which was dominated by middle-class blacks. In his Bakke dissent, he wrote: In light of the sorry history of discrimination and its devastating impact on the lives of Negroes, bringing the Negro into the mainstream of American life should be a state interest of the highest order. In addition, black teachers who acted as plaintiffs in salary equalization suits ran serious risk of being fireda particularly severe risk given the desperate scarcity of jobs in America in the 1930s.*. The small number of students might have meant a smaller teacher-student ratio, but it also meant an inferior education. To this end, a new s~ction (headed by Dr. John W. Davis, former president of West Virginia State College) has been added to the Legal Defense arm of the Association. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Was a new building constructed for the white school and not the black one? Such an exclusion meant that the education at the separate law school for blacks was not the equal of the one received by whites. (1952) and Gebbart v. Bulah (1952). Such qualities, to name a few, include reputation of the faculty, experience of the administration, position and influence of the alumni, standing in the community, and prestige." 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. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, is America's oldest and largest civil rights organization. Social science surveys, as well as day-to-day practice indicate an acceptance of interracial relations in family life, marriage, and adoption that clearly would have been unthinkable in 1954 when the Brown decision was handed down. The faculty consisted of two part-time instructors. The civil rights struggles of the 1960s, which led to among other things the critical Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, played a crucial role in dismantling legal support for the American system of race as caste. In 1931, the NAACP's first staff attorney, Nathan Margold, outlined a legal strategy to challenge school segregation. All Rights Reserved. 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. Log in for more information. No two of these cases were argued by the exact same legal team. Watch acclaimed Black History documentaries on HISTORY Vault. 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. He was still the only black attorney in Delaware when the desegregation cases were filed more than 20 years later. The jurists would be caught in a difficult analytical box from which there could be no escape. These cases, Hirabayashi v. United States (1943) and Korematsu v. United States (1944), involved the imposition of curfews, relocation, and confinement of Japanese Americans on the West Coast. No matter how much money the state might spend at the black law school, how many faculty members the state might add, how large the student body might grow, or how large the library holdings might become, the qualitative differences in the intangibles associated with the two schools meant that to deny Heman Sweatt admission to the University of Texas was unconstitutional. Gardner's group initiated a boycott of a black high school that was overcrowded and in a state of severe disrepair. There was no need. In all of these tangible factors, the Court found the University of Texas superior. The Brown decision was momentous, but with respect to the issues of race and racial discrimination, even with respect to the issue of school segregation, the decision was hardly definitive. While practicing law in Washington, D.C., Houston taught law part-time at Howard University Law School. First among these was the United States government. He served as Associate Justice from 1967-1991 after being nominated by President Lyndon B. Johnson. It was formed in New York City by white and Black activists, partially in response to the ongoing violence against Black Americans around the country. Add an answer or comment Log in or sign up Questions asked by the same visitor Like Donald Murray, Marshall was a Baltimore native. Racism still exists. In 1936, Marshall became the NAACPs chief legal counsel. The Racial History Of The Grandfather Clause. NPR. In effect, the Supreme Court in Sweatt was going well beyond Murray by saying that segregation in law school is inherently unequal. Both the tangible and the intangible factors were inferior. The judge was the same one who had held that the vastly inferior Prairie View school was equal. The school was housed in two rented rooms in Houston. 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." All rights reserved. Howard became a clearinghouse and research center for those involved in the fight against segregation. The NAACP won the case and it was a big victory for civil rights. The part-time faculty members were professors from the University of Texas School of Law. In 1957, LDF, led by Marshall, became an entirely separate entity from the NAACP with its own leadership and board of directors and has remained a separate organization to this day. The aim was to produce, in the words of the conference report, "education on a nonsegregated basis that no relief other than that will be acceptable.". Did order Donald Murray admitted to the Jim Crow school professor at the law. The black one factors were inferior and Gebbart v. Bulah ( 1952 ) and Gebbart Bulah. 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