Jack Greenberg named as Thurgood Marshall Successor
Press Release
October 4, 1961

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Press Releases, Loose Pages. Jack Greenberg named as Thurgood Marshall Successor, 1961. 711912be-bc92-ee11-be37-00224827e97b. LDF Archives, Thurgood Marshall Institute. https://ldfrecollection.org/archives/archives-search/archives-item/8b75f704-44cd-46ff-b21b-c5da553afc18/jack-greenberg-named-as-thurgood-marshall-successor. Accessed April 19, 2025.
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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. =302=