Mass Demonstrations: The New Legal Challenge

    10 Columbus Cirele 

New York, N.Y. 10019 
JUdson 6-8397 

NAACP 

Legal Defense and Educational Fund 
PRESS RELEASE 

lar aytre Knight Chalmers 
Director-Counsel 

Jack Greenberg 
Associate Counsel 

Constance Baker Motley 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE --August 16, 1963 

Mass Demonstrations: The New Legal Challenge 

By 

Jack Greenberg, Director-Counsel 

NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. 

Since most street demonstrations invariably end in a 

courtroom and since hundreds of school and public accommodations 

cases remain to be filed and won, The NAACP Legal Defense and 

Educational Fund, Inc, has been expanding its activities to 

continue to serve, as in the past, the legal arm of the civil 

rights movement. 

We now represent more than 7,500 demonstrators involved in 

125 civil rights actions across the country. These comprise 

members of all the major civil rights organizations. 

The current crisis has caused a vast increase in civil 

rights litigation. Two factors are primarily responsible: 

a) the wave of peaceful protest demonstrations that began 

with the sit-ins in 1960, and capped off by Birmingham and its 

aftermath. 

b) sharpened opposition to court orders requiring desegre- 

gation, characterized by increasing complex legal activity, on 

part of the southern white community, to counter our legal efforts. 

For obvious reasons, almdst no southern white lawyers will 

handle race relations cases, Th many places, there are no Negro 

attorneys with training adequate to cooperate with the NAACP Legal 

Defense and Educational Fund, 

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



Mass Demonstrations 

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Tallahassee, for example, the capital city of Florida, does 

not have one practicing Negro lawyer. C. B. King of Albany, Ga, 

is the lone civil rights attorney in southwestern Georgia. There 

are only three Negro civil rights lawyers in the entire State of 

Mississippi. 

There are virtually no Negro lawyers anywhere in the most 

crucial parts of the rural South, 

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, through long 

and short-range planning, is moving to cope with the present 

erisis in four ways: 

I. Julius LeVonne Chambers, brilliant graduate of the 

University of North Carolina's law school, where he became the 

first of his race to be editor-in-chief of the North Carolina 

Law Review, will join our staff in September, 

He will be our first legal intern. 

Mr. Chambers, and other participants in our legal intern 

program were and will be chosen with the understanding that they 

eventually practice law in southern communities where there is 

an acute shortage of attorneys qualified to handle civil rights 

cases. 

The interns will work in the Legal Defense Fund's New York 

office, under supervision of our legal staff, They will assist 

in research, litigation, and preparation of briefs. 

Internship will be completed in one year. They will then 

go to a community in the South where a civil rights lawyer is 

needed, and where reasonable prospects exist for an eventual 

private practice, For the first three years of their practice 

we will assist them in getting started. 

Another young attorney will join Mr, Chambers during the 

first phase of our program, which is being underwritten by an 

initial $25,000 grant from the Field Foundation, We expect this 

program to expand to six lawyer-interns by next year. 

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II. In keeping with our pledge to defend all civil rights 

demonstrators seeking our assistance, the staff of the NAACP 

Legal Defense Fund has doubled during the past year. 

We had five attorneys working in this office in October 1961. 

In October 1962, we had nine. We plan to have 17 by the end of 

this year, and we are bringing them in just as fast as we can 

absorb them. 

In addition, we now have 100 cooperating attorneys through- 

out the South, an increase of 25 percent during the past three 

years. 

Expansion of our staff legal talent is essential since 

most of the research and brief writing is done in our New York 

office. There are some 70 school integration cases on our 

current docket. However, this number would be more than doubled 

if we had four or five additional lawyers on our staff at this 

time. 

III. Our physical facilities were doubled by our move to 

new offices three weeks ago. This was made possible by our 

expanding budget. We projected a $650,000 budget in 1962 and 

secured it. We projected a $750,000 budget for this year, but 

if the current trend of contributions continue, we will budget 

$1,100,000 for 1963, 

IV. We will hold practicing law institutes, to share the 

latest legal knowledge with our cooperating counsel, in three 

southern cities -- Washington, D. C., Atlanta, and Dallas -- this 

fall. They will be conducted by professors from Columbia, Yale, 

Howard and other Law Schools. 

These seminar-like sessions will cover crucial legal areas 

such as: constitutional law, including freedom of speech; school 

and public facility desegregation; federal procedure; criminal 

law; evidence. 

We will then publish manuals which will serve as a continuing 

guide to civil rights attorneys. 

Through these steps, plus the continued devotion of Legal 

Defense Fund attorneys, legalism will continue to be a potent 

weapon in the Negro's march for dignity. 

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