Civil Rights: Constitutional Commandos

It may be the sit-ins, pray-ins, stall-ins and school boycotts that stir headlines and dramatize Negro grievances. But the fundamental civil rights revolution has been in the courts, where in ten years U.S. Negroes have made giant strides.

The leading force behind this progress is a kind of constitutional commando—Manhattan’s N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. Though it has only 14 fulltime lawyers, the aggressive defense fund has in recent years argued more cases before the Supreme Court than any other non-governmental organization. Last week it scored again when the court ordered faster school desegregation in Atlanta (see EDUCATION). While also celebrating its 25th birthday, the “Inc. Fund,” as it is now known by its many friends and many foes, basked in praise from such admirers as Burke Marshall, the Justice Department’s civil rights chief, who called the fund “a gigantic force for change.”

Revolutionary Counsel. Now proudly independent, the Inc. Fund grew out of the N.A.A.C.P.’s legal victories of the late 1930s, which were largely the work of two brilliant Negro lawyers, Charles Houston and young Thurgood Marshall. On a budget of less than $10,000 a year, their office a car speeding from court to court, Houston and Marshall won a key desegregation case against the University of Missouri Law School in 1938, and suddenly the N.A.A.C.P. was deluged with a flood of new cases to try. To raise cash, it spun off the legal fund in 1939 as a tax-exempt organization.

In 1950, Director-Counsel Marshall pierced “separate but equal” segregation when the Supreme Court ordered Heman Sweatt admitted as the first Negro at the University of Texas Law School and told the University of Oklahoma to stop isolating Negro Graduate Student George McLaurin. Sweatt and McLaurin opened the way for 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision against school segregation. After that came a virtually unbroken string of Inc. Fund triumphs against segregated buses, beaches, golf courses, hospitals and courtrooms—the major victories of the U.S. civil rights revolution.

Top Training Ground. When Marshall became a federal judge in 1961, he was succeeded by Jack Greenberg, then 36, a Columbia-trained lawyer whom Marshall fondly calls “about as Negro as a white man can get.” Greenberg’s No. 2 man is a woman, the formidable Negro lawyer and New York State senator, Constance Baker Motley (Columbia ’46), who in 1962 calmly convoyed James Meredith through the courts into Ole Miss. “We couldn’t have asked for anyone better,” says the Justice Department’s Burke Marshall. “She could work for anyone.”

But not anyone can work for the Inc. Fund; its current staff, including three whites, is heavy on ex-law-review editors and Ivy League products. Under a pioneering legal-intern program, the fund is training and will subsidize civil rights lawyers to fill an urgent need: fulltime practice in the South. The entire state of Mississippi, for example, has at present only four Negro lawyers. One promising recruit: Julius L. Chambers, son of an auto mechanic and first Negro to edit the North Carolina Law Review.

Solid foundation grants have now boosted the Inc. Fund’s bankroll to $1,500,000, which is still austere for an organization that last year (aided by 102 cooperating lawyers) defended 10,487 civil rights demonstrators, fought 168 separate groups of legal actions in 15 states, and pushed 30 cases up to the Supreme Court. A single such high-court case costs as much as $50,000; in six months of defending 3,000 Birmingham demonstrators last year, the fund shelled out $105,000.

Rewon Freedoms. Director Greenberg sees the fund’s main future as “enforcement of the major precedents we established.” Acting on last week’s Supreme Court order in Atlanta, for example, the fund aims to tackle tokenism in 80 other school cases. Also under way are training institutes for Southern civil rights lawyers, taught by Northern law professors, plus legal seminars for more Northern lawyers and 2,000 Northern collegians, who will spend this summer trying to register Negro voters in Mississippi. If and when the civil rights bill passes, predicts Greenberg, “massive resistance to its enforcement” will plunge the fund into more litigation than ever.