Jack Greenberg named as Thurgood Marshall Successor

    PRESS RELEASE 

NAACP LEGAL DEFENSE AND EDUCATIONAL FUND 
10 COLUMBUS CIRCLE + NEW YORK 19,N.Y. © JUdson 6-8397 

DR. ALLAN KNIGHT CHALMERS C-> THURGOOD MARSHALL 
President Director-Counsel 

JACK GREENBERG NAMED AS 

THURGOOD MARSHALL SUCCESSOR 

October 4, 1961 

The Board of Directors of the NAACP Legal Defense and 

Educational Fund, Inc. announced tonight that Jack Greenberg 

has been elected to succeed Thurgood Marshall as General Counsel. 

The Board, at a dinner meeting, accepted the resignation 

of Mr. Marshall, who had been Director-Counsel since 1950, and 

has for twenty-five years been associated with the legal work 

of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored 

People. 

Mr, Greenberg, 37, was Mr. Marshall's principal assistant, 

and Assistant Counsel of the Fund since 1949. 

Dr. Allan Knight Chalmers, Professor of Applied Theology 

at Boston University School of Religion, and currently Chair- 

man of the Fund's Board of Directors, will devote more time 

to the day-to-day work of the organization. 

Mr. Marshall has been nominated by President Kennedy for 

a federal judgeship on the U. S. Court of Appeals for the 

Second Circuit. For a quarter of a century he has been in 

the forefront of the fight for civil rights. 

Mr. Greenberg is a native New Yorker, a graduate of 

Columbia College and the Columbia University Law School, 

who has devoted all but one year of his professional legal 

carzer to the work of the Fund. During his twelve y«ars on 

the Fund staff, he has worked on virtually every major civil 

rights case in which it has participated. 



He helped to prepare the Legal Defense Fund brief in the 

School Segregation Cases of 1954 and 1955, and argued in those 

cases before the Supreme Court. He will argue the defense of Negro 

students convicted in sit-in demonstrations in Baton Rouge, La., 

before the Supreme Court on October 18, 1961, the first sit-in 

case which the Supreme Court will hear. 

Mr. Greenberg is the author of Race Relations and American 

Law, a book which the New York Times reviewer called "indispensable 

for anyone seriously interested in this country's oldest and 

probably still gravest domestic problem, the status of the Negro." 

He is now conducting a study, under the auspices of the Columbia 

University Council for Research in Social Science, of civil liber- 

ties in seventeen countries. 

He is married to the former Sema Ann Tanzer of Wilmington, 

Del. The Greenbergs, who live in Great Neck, L. I., are the 

parents of four children. 

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