Civil Rights Voice
Narrator
The narrator describes the conditions that led to the creation of the Legal Defense Fund in 1940. Segregation, such as Jim Crow laws that discriminated against African Americans, and the rise of new ideas in the 20's and 30's, influenced the new generation of lawyers who would later challenge Jim Crow and champion civil rights in the courts.
Transcript
The time is the early 20th century. Segregation, America's apartheid rules, two cultures: one Black, one White. Violence. Lynchings. Stain the fabric of the land of the free and the home of the brave. The law? When it's not ignoring Blacks, it's being used against them. The Constitution says, "No state shall deny its citizens equal protection under the law." To Black Americans, that promise seems empty.
The intellectual and creative ferment of the 20s and 30s gives rise to a generation of lawyers who work their way through small towns in the South, building the cases that will take on Jim Crow. Call them circuit riding hope givers. In 1940, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund is formally incorporated under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall. With a series of cases building to Brown versus Board of Education, LDF begins to transform the legal system into a tool for justice. A civil rights revolution builds in the streets. Legal Defense Fund lawyers carry it into the courts.
