Greenberg Speech at Harvard Club, Boston - "Action in the Courts for Civil Rights, 1965-1970"

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10 Columbus Circle ry) 
Lr New York, N.Y. 10019 1C! : 

JUdson 6-8397 — 

NAACP 

Legal Defense and Educational Fund 
PRESS RELEASE 
President 

Dr. Allan Knight Chalmers 

Director-Counsel 
Jack Greenberg 

Remarks by Jack Greenberg, director-counsel 
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., 
Harvard Club, Boston, Mass. May 12, 1965, Ss 30 PM 

ACTION IN THE COURTS FOR CIVIL RIGHTS 
1965--1970 

The Achievement 

Precisely eleven years after the Supreme Court decision of 

1954, school integration, at least in token aeastve, has finally 

been initiated in every state of the South. Statutory barriers 

to inequality have been virtually eliminated. 

This has been in large measure the result of hundreds of suits 

filed by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund to achieve 

the constitutional rights of Negro citizens in education, 

employment, health, housing, public accommodations, recreation, and 

voting. Every gain has been hard fought, requiring repeated 

appeals to higher courts and has demanded untold sacrifice on the 

part of Negro plaintiffs. They have risked physical violence and 

economic ruin in defying age-old patterns of racial domination 

in taking their demands to court. 

The Present 

Yet in May 1965 most Nearoes in America stil] lead searenated 

dives. Eleven years of fanatic resistance by the ignorant and 

bigoted, the deliberate efforts of southern officials financed by 

public treasuries to counter suits initiated (and financed) by the 

Legal Defense Fund have kept implementation of court decisions to 

a shallow appearance of compliance. Barely 3% of Negro children 

in the deep South attend schools with white children, Court 

orders explicitly banning discrimination against Negro patients and 

physicians in hospitals have seldom brought change except in the 

particular inet ueution which was sued, 

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Jesse DeVore, Jr., Director of Public Information—Night Number 212 Riverside 9-8487 Seo 



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Remarks by Jack Greenberg, director-counsel 
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., 
Harvard Club, Boston, Mass. May 12, 1965, 5:30 PM 

eoict decisions exonerating sit-in demonstrators, who 

protested segregation of places of public accommodation, brought 

only spotty remedial action until the passage of the 1964 Civil 

Rights Act. Even here, non-compliance has required numerous suits 

to gates for Negroes the rights established in law, 

Today, in the United States Negroes are, in massive numbers, 

denied an equal opportunity to get an education, to obtain shelter, 

to secure the amenities of life, to receive treatment when ill, 

to gain a livelihood or practice a profession for which they are 

equipped or to have a fair trial in a court of justice. This - in 

spite of the great body of court decisions which, in keeping with 

the principles of our Constitution, affirm that all citizens are 

equal. 

The Next Five Years 

Only by pushing the frontiers of the Law beyond limits which 

are now recognized can we hope to accelerate the change from \ 

token equality to full realization for all citizens of their . 

constitutional rights. 

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A group of leading constitutional lawyers associated with the 

NAACP Legal Defense Fund has met during the past half year to 

develop a program of more effective legal actions, concepts, iP, 
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methods, and tactics through which law can be used to secure id 

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equality for American Negroes in practice. 

The approach is designated "New Frontiers of the Law", It 33 

will be implemented in the next three to five years but will ¥ 7 

supplement rather than replace the broad program of action in the 4 

courts in which the Fund has been engaged as the legal arm of the 

civil rights movement. The Defense Fund's pledge to defend eve: 

citizen arrested in peaceful protest actions will always be a 

priority ‘responsibility to be honored with every resource we can 

ymaster i ge t hae “been'lin. “Selma, in Bheniighen, and in all of 

rural M 
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tes. by Jack Greenberg, director-counsel 
‘CP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., 

Harvard Club, Boston, Mass. May 12, 1965, 5:30 PM 

A few first steps already undertaken will illustrate the 

techniques envisaged, 

Capital Punishment 

Capital punishment for rape exists only in the eleven states 

of the Old Confederacy, the District of Columbia and six border 

states. It falls almost exclusively on Negroes charged with this 

crime against white women, 

The Legal Defense Fund, we announce today, is currently f 

defending 16 persons under death sentence for rape. We are 

seeking to demonstrate that these sentences are being applied in 

a discriminatory pattern. 

From 1930 to 1963, 402 Negroes were executed for rape, while 

only 45 whites met the same fate according to Justice Department 

statistics. Strikingly, there is no such disparity between the 

races in the number of convictions for rape; an exhaustive study 

in the state of Florida shows that 46% of those convicted for rape 

in the last 25 years were whites, while since 1930 only one white 

but 35 Negroes have been executed for this crime. 

We will work against this and other discriminatory uses of 

the criminal law and instances in which that law falls with 

unequal severity on Negroes. 

Schools 

The stubborn effort to implement the 1954 school desegregation 

decision has involved the Fund in hundreds of suits in the past 

decade against individual school districts. (At present there are 

36 eeits in the courts in North Carolina, 19 in Florida, 21 in 

Louisiana, etc.) Only in Delaware has it been possible to conduct 

a single state-wide school desegregation case successfully. The 

Fun } will make new efforts--exemplified by a case recently filed 

in Louisiana--to develop state-wide lawsuits to -pronete school 

ucauconstion. ® 4 

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Remarks by Jack Greenberg, director-counsel 
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., 
Harvard Club, Boston, Mass. May 12, 1965, 53 30 PM 

‘More specifically, such suits are being considered against 

state Bpaxde of education and other state officers and agencies 

which under state law, have sufficient power to order desegregation 

\ py local school boards. For example, there may be actions to 

enjoin state finance officers from continuing to disburse funds 

to local boards for use on a racially segregated basis. The Fund 

aleoypians to increase its efforts to desegregate the faculties 

of public schools. 

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Housing 

Covert agreements of real estate brokers to refuse to sell. 

to Negroes outside designated Negro blocks and their pressures on 

individual owners have frustrated most efforts to gain open 

housing. | 

We will be filing a series of suits under the sherode Anti- 

trust Act against local real estate boards and brokers for 

refusing to sell to Negroes, 

Legal Defense Fund attotneys have already filed such a suit 

in Akron, Ohio against the 1,800 member Akron Area Board of 

Realtors in which it asked that the Board be "permanently enjoined 

and restrained" because its members are operating in violation of 

Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust 

Act. ‘ 

If the Courts apply the Sherman Act to combinations practicing 

racial discrimination, it will amount to a Federal conspiracy 

statute against housing discrimination that will have profound 

impact across the nation. 

$ 

Pag Employment 

ite Civil Rights Act of 1964 opens doors for legal remedies on 

@ massive scale to require equal treatment of Negroes in private 

employment, thus setting the stage for legal action of a . 

Magnitude forswhich gthere is.no precedent. The Legal Defense Fund 

will wage an agressive campaign to enforce the new law (effective 

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Remarks by Gack Geesebacn: director-counsel 
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., 
Harvard Club, Boston, Mass. May 12, 1965, 5:30 PM 

July 2, 1965) by pressing complaints before the Equal Employment 

Opportunity Commission which is specifically charged with combating 

job discrimination in private industry. 

Where and when necessary, we will proceed in the Courts. 

With this regard, we have had and will continue, to have 

training conferences for our 120 cooperating attorneys (and others 

active in civil rights law) to acquaint them with the new law, 

We are mounting a network of communication and procedures so that 

civil rights attorneys across the nation can be kept abreast with 

the best means of implementing the law. 

We will work closely with all the major civil rights 

organizations active in the employment field and will provide 

legal services when and where needed. 

We have attempted through the above illustrations merely to 

suggest a few of the possibilities which the Defense Fund plans 

to explore in the years ahead. 

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