Jack Greenberg
LDF 2nd Director-Counsel
Jack Greenberg succeeded Thurgood Marshall as LDF’s second Director-Counsel from 1961-84. Greenberg first joined LDF in 1949 as a 24 year-old Columbia Law School graduate. At the time, Marshall was looking for an assistant to help fight Jim Crow. A few years later, a 27 year-old Greenberg became the youngest member of the team of lawyers that brought the Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation cases to the Supreme Court. At LDF, he was an assistant counsel from 1949-61 under the aegis of Thurgood Marshall.
Transcript
[Musical introduction] Then the great demonstrations began in 1960 and we represented the movement. We represented Dr King, we represented poor. And in its early days, we began representing SNCC. And then dozens of ad hoc community groups, the Albany movement, the Jackson movement and the national movement and so forth. And we brought the lawsuit that permitted Martin King to march in Selma. We represented Dr King in Birmingham, and indeed there, the movement brought about 40 cases to the Supreme Court of the United States, and we represented them in virtually all of those cases and we won them all except one.
The Legal Defense Fund was founded in 1939. And it had a small staff then of just two or three lawyers, and it was headed by Thurgood Marshall. And then our job was solely to make precedent. We weren't big enough to do very much along the line of enforcement. And we started in with, the cases to integrate the universities. And when I came to work here in 1949 we had before the Supreme Court of the United States the cases which were aimed at integrating the University of Texas and University of Oklahoma. Then followed the school segregation cases, Brown v. Board of Education, and that of course, was the great landmark case, one of the great cases, you might even say perhaps the greatest case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States.
Transcript
After the Brown decision, our work began to change somewhat. We still continued with precedent making cases. We brought the case that required integration of hospitals. And we brought a good number of cases under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which upheld its constitutionality. But we had many cases that were principally involved with enforcement. We brought the Meredith case, we integrated the University of Alabama. In fact, there is not a southern state university system which was not sued by us to require its integration, with the exception of Arkansas. And they integrated when a lawsuit was announced, and we didn't actually have to go through.
Transcript
In deciding to take a case, we look for: what are the implications of the case? What leverage will it have? Will it interpret an important federal statute? Will it make a new legal precedent? Sometimes the case won't make a new legal precedent, but it will make an important social precedent. A case requiring desegregation of a large industrial plant in a major city, even though it doesn't make any new law, will have a tremendous impact for that city. It actually brings about integration. So we look: will it be a social precedent? Or will it be a legal precedent? That's the kind of thing we look for. We look for the case that will have a big multiplier.
Transcript
As I see it, the question is just: what are we lawyers doing? What are we accomplishing? Well, you start in, you've got the statutes of the United States and you've got the Constitution of the United States, and you got the decisions of the courts. And they kind of reach on down from from Washington to the states and the local government. But then there's this gap. How do you kind of take this and connect it up with the people? Now, traditionally, in our form of government, the way that's been done is either the public officials have obeyed the law on their own, or somebody has gone to court and compelled them to obey it. Well, the essence of our problem is that they have not obeyed the law on their own. The constitution has required that there not be segregation, but people nevertheless segregate. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 says labor unions and businesses can't, patients can't discriminate, but they do. Hospitals can't discriminate. They do. Well, how do you bridge this gap? The way it's been done, indeed, the only way it can be done is that some lawyer goes into court and hands a piece of paper in and starts the machinery rolling. He invokes the law, and he brings out the facts, and if the courts do their duty as traditionally they have, then an order comes out and says that you may not segregate in the jury and you may not discriminate the Philip Morris company, and you can't discriminate in the hospital, and yet you can't keep Negroes out of the hamburger stand, and you can't segregate in the school and so forth. All these things we've been talking about. Unless a lawyer does it, it doesn't get done.
Transcript
I've had cases that I've lost or haven't come out right, about which I've said, if I knew then what I know now, I would do it differently. Not so about Brown. I think we were lucky. We we did it just right. It was one of those things that we did, I think, as perfectly as you could have. The victory represented by the high court's decision became a turning point in reshaping American society. In effect, Brown v. Board of Education signed Jim Crow's death warrant. Brown and the legal strategy it put forth to break the back of segregation set the stage for the modern Civil Rights Movement. We also thought that if we won, that would not be the end of it. Thurgood said back then, we would still have to go county by county. Still we did not estimate correctly the depth and fierceness of the opposition.
