Thurgood Marshal Reports on Legal Defense Fund Activities

    PRESS RELEASE® e 

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

DR. ALLAN KNIGHT CHALMERS c= THURGOOD MARSHALL 
President Director-Counsel 

FOR RELEASE: Friday, January 6, 196 

THURGOOD MARSHALL REPORTS ON 
LEGAL DEFENSE FUND ACTIVITIES 

NEW YORK. -- Defending the students arrested in connection with 

sit-in protest demonstrations and speeding up the legal activities for 

school desegregation in several states, are the major objectives of the 

NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund for 1961, Thurgood Marshall, 

the Fund's director-counsel, announced today. 

Approximately 1700 students were arrested and convicted during 

1960 in whose behalf attorneys for the Legal Defense Fund have filed 

suits arising out of the sit-in demonstrations. He said the battery of 

some 75 Negro and white lawyers throughout the country are now engaged 

in defending the students. 

As the new year begins, cases are on record which were filed in 

behalf of Negro children,in almost every southern state, who were 

barred from schools supported by public funds, because of their race. 

This includes renewed legal action in two of the original five cases 

which resulted in the Supreme Court's 1954 decision outlawing segrega- 

tion in public education. 

Mr. Marshall declared that the Legal Defense Fund "gladly assumes 

full responsibility" for defending the Negroes who have been accused 

and convicted because of the sit-in demonstrations. 

"Most of them (the Negro students) have been charged and convicted 

for crimes such as disorderly conduct, trespass, interfering with busi- 

ness and parading without a license," Mr. Marshall said. 

"The only crime they have committed was to protest in an orderly 

and peaceful manner the denial of their right to sit at lunch counters," 

he pointed out. "To protest against injustices is the foundation of 

our American democracy." 



sie @ @ 

The Legal Defense Fund head is highly pleased and enthused with 

three full scale lawyers' conferences held in New York, Washington, 

D. C. and St. Paul during 1960 in connection with the sit-in demonstra- 

tions. Ideas and legal theories in these cases were exchanged at the 

conferences, as well as scores of drafts of pleadings and briefs on 

the law and other material pertinent to the sit-in demonstrations were 

prepared and distributed, Mr. Marshall disclosed. "These conferences 

brought about a marvelous spirit of cooperation among the lawyers 

which assures us of vitory," he stated. 

As a result, Mr. Marshall asserted, several of the sit-in cases 

have already been reversed by higher courts while others are still on 

appeal in state appellate courts. 

The first sit-in case reached the U. S. Supreme Court on December 

31, 1960, when Legal Defense Fund attorneys filed three petitions in 

behalf of 15 Negro students arrested last spring in Baton Rouge, La. 

The high Court was urged to hear these cases on the ground that the 

arrests and convictions violated the students’ constitutional rights 

to protest discrimination and seek equal treatment at public lunch 

counters, 

The attorneys also urged the Supreme Court to lay down basic 

guidance for lower courts to follow in similar cases. 

With respect to public school desegregation, Mr. Marshall said 

the events revolving around the New Orleans school crisis again focused 

attention on America's public school segregation issues. 

"The New Orleans episode may become either the dying gasp of mas- 

sive resistance in interposition theories or another rallying point 

for defiant southern states to continue resistance to the Supreme 

Court's 1954 decision prohibiting school segregation," Mr. Marshall 

stated. 

"If the federal government takes a firm position and the ‘uncom- 

mitted' public awakens to the great danger to America represented by 

massive resistance to the law in the name of segregation, 1961 could 

produce considerable civil rights advances." 

The Legal Defense Fund head looks ahead with considerable hope. 

He pointed out that while Little Rock and New Orleans have received a 

great deal of public notice, Houston, Texas, on the other hand, which 

has the largest segregated public school system in the South, began 

token desegregation last September without serious incident. 



Marshall noted that the Justice Department has increased its 

activity on behalf of Negro voters rights following a Supreme Court 

decision upholding the Civil Rights Act of 1957. He also observed 

that the courts gave evidence of increasing impatience with segrega- 

tionist stalling tactics as the 12-year stair-step desegregation plans 

were rejected as too slow in cases arising in Delaware and Virginia. 

In another case a federal appeals court held that Birmingham, 

Alabama's municipal bus line may not require segregated seating, while 

another court held that the Greenville, South Carolina airport may not 

require Negroes to use its segregated airport waiting room. 

During the coming year the Supreme Court will hear arguments by 

Fund attorneys in a case involving the exclusion of Negroes from juries 

in Alabama. A decision by the Supreme Court is awaited by the Fund 

on a petition by Legal Defense attorneys to hear argument in another 

Alabama case involving the right to representation by a lawyer at pre- 

liminary stages of criminal proceedings in cases where the death penalty 

may be imposed. 

=*30-- 

January 4, 1961