Youth-Lawyer Partnership Hailed for Rights Triumphs
Press Release
June 26, 1964
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Press Releases, Loose Pages. Youth-Lawyer Partnership Hailed for Rights Triumphs, 1964. c531f77f-bd92-ee11-be37-6045bddb811f. LDF Archives, Thurgood Marshall Institute. https://ldfrecollection.org/archives/archives-search/archives-item/a8eb6ed4-5d54-48dd-97df-9793ec0651a9/youth-lawyer-partnership-hailed-for-rights-triumphs. Accessed December 04, 2025.
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New York, N.Y. 10019
JUdson 6-8397
NAACP
Legal Defense and Educational Fund
PRESS RELEASE t“
rr. Allan Knight Chalmers L
Director-Counsel
Jack Greenberg
June 26, 1964
ounsel dsipctate
Constance Baker Motley
YOUTH - LAWYER PARTNERSHIP
HAILED FOR RIGHTS TRIUMPHS
Defense Fund Announces Summer Attack on Lawlessness
WASHINGTON, D.C.--The unusual partnership of young people and
lawyers "will push the country over the top on civil rights faster
than anyone ever would guess it could be done," NAACP Legal
Defense Fund Director-Counsel Jack Greenberg told the Youth Ban-
quet of the national NAACP Convention here this week.
At the same time, Mr. Greenberg revealed Legal Defense Fund
plans to combat the growing wave of lawlessness on the part of
Southern officials and citizens' groups.
For the summer, the Defense Fund will have the services of W.
Robert Ming and his Chicago law firm and of Charles P, Morgan Jr.
of Washington. "Both are superb professionals in this struggle,"
Mr. Greenberg said.
Attorney Ming is "one of the foremost civil rights lawyers and
scholars in the country," Mr, Greenberg noted. Mr. Morgan was "the
only white lawyer in Birmingham, Ala. with courage to speak up
against the outrages of that city, and as a reward was driven from
it,"
Mr. Greenberg further announced an increase in the Defense Fund
staff to 17 full-time lawyers. He added that top law professors
are conducting a series of seminars under Fund auspices "to sharpen
the training of our 120 cooperating lawyers throughout the South,
without whom there would be no such thing as civil rights in their
communities.
"Our goal is that when there is a job to be done, there should
be a lawyer available to do it," Mr. Greenberg stated.
(more)
Jesse DeVore, Jr., Director of Public Information—Night Number 212 Riverside 9-8487
Youth - Lawyer Partnership -2- June 26, 1964
Hailed for Rights Triumphs
In his talk to the assembled young paople, Mr. Greenberg
traced the pace-setting role of the law that led to the historic
precedent of Brown yv. Board of Education in 1954,
Lashing out at tokenism, Mr. Greenberg warmly praised the
youths who, in seeing through the "hypocrisy of our community
leaders," initiated the sit-ins and peaceful demonstrations in
the '60's,
"It is no accident that the sit-ins began in Greensboro, N.C,
and rapidly spread through Raleigh, Durham, Charlotte and else-
where in that state because those are the communities where token-
ism was practiced as a fine art," he continued.
Mr. Greenberg said that attorneys are now at work to secure
enforcement of the precedents Legal Defense Fund suits have
created over the years. He stressed the efforts to integrate
schools and hospitals, and to defend demonstrators.
Citing the recent U.S, Supreme Court reversal of 77 sit-in
convictions, Mr, Greenberg emphasized that the law has repeatedly
sanctioned peaceful demonstrating, and that "violence almost
always has come from white supremacists.
"The hallmark of a demonstration is what NAACP youth and the
youth of other organizations were doing when they quietly sat
at the lunch counters all over the South, or paraded on the state
house grounds and made solemn witness against the greatest moral
crime that exists in this country.
"We will triumph if we keep it that way, as I am sure we will,"
Mr. Greenberg told the banquet meeting.
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