12 Dec Who Were Apart of the Naacp Legal Defense Team
Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, people were abducted from the African continent, enslaved in American colonies, and exploited to work in the production of crops such as tobacco and cotton. In the middle of the 19th century, the expansion of America westward and the . The NAACP challenged the law and won a legal victory in 1915 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Guinn v. United States that grandfather clauses were unconstitutional. Perhaps the most famous case in DFL history is Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court explicitly prohibited racial segregation in de jure public educational institutions. During the civil rights protests of the 1960s, LDF represented “the legal arm of the civil rights movement” and advised Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., among others. In 1940, Thurgood Marshall founded the DFL as a separate legal entity, and in 1957, the organization became completely independent of the NAACP.[2] The NAACP Board of Directors established the Legal Defense Fund in 1940 specifically for tax purposes.
In 1957, intimidated by the U.S. Treasury, Internal Revenue Service, and Southern governments, LDF was completely separated from the NAACP and given its own board of directors and staff. Emmett Till was brutally murdered on August 28, 1955, at the age of fourteen, for allegedly reporting a white woman while visiting friends in Money, Mississippi. The woman`s husband and friends kidnapped, beat and shot Till and dumped her body in the Tallahatchie River, where she was discovered three days later. He could only be identified by a ring on his finger. The decision of Till`s mother, Granny Till-Bradley, to bring his body to Chicago, and her insistence on an open casket, led to the social situation in the country attracting national attention. The photos released by Till sparked a global outcry for change and an end to discrimination and white supremacy. Louis Martin (1912-1997), a renowned journalist and newspaper editor, was the principal black adviser to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Carter and vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1961 to 1969. Martin kept this notebook to record his travels and activities during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. LDF is completely independent and separate from the NAACP. [2] Although LDF can trace its origins back to the NAACP Legal Department, founded in the 1930s by Charles Hamilton Houston,[3][4] Thurgood Marshall founded LDF as a separate legal entity in 1940 and LDF became completely independent of the NAACP in 1957.
[2] This “grandfather clause” allowed illiterate whites to avoid the reading test while discriminating against illiterate blacks whose ancestors were denied the right to vote in 1866 by forcing them to take a test to vote. Of all the injustices the DFLs have challenged over its seven-decade history, few confront our nation with violence as sheer as racial inequalities in the criminal justice system. LDF challenged the lack of legal representation, discriminatory jury selection, the death penalty and criminal laws, and harsh sentences that disproportionately affect African Americans and conspire to ensure the incarceration of large numbers of blacks in prison. Jim Crow laws were a set of state and local laws that legalized racial segregation. Named after a black minstrel show character, the laws, which existed for about 100 years from the post-Civil War period until 1968, aimed to marginalize African Americans through the United States. read more In the passage shown here, he reports on the reaction of the White House to the 1963 election campaign in Birmingham. Daisy Bates, editor-in-chief of the Arkansas State Press and president of the Arkansas State Conference of NAACP Branches, led the NAACP`s campaign to end segregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, public schools. Thurgood Marshall was General Counsel. The Little Rock School Board has approved the admission of nine Black teenagers to Central High School.
The decision outraged many white citizens, including Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus. He ordered the Arkansas National Guard to surround Central High School under the guise of maintaining law and order, and black students were repeatedly blocked by angry guards and white mobs. President Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock to uphold the Supreme Court`s decision of September 25, 1957, to safely escort students to Central High School. In the midst of the crisis, Daisy Bates wrote this letter. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., grew up in New York City. During her tenure in Congress, she co-authored the amendment to Title IX of the Higher Education Act, which extended the protection against discrimination of the 1964 Act to women. In September 1962, a federal court ordered the University of Mississippi to accept James Meredith, a twenty-eight-year-old Air Force veteran, after a sixteen-month legal battle. Governor Ross Barnett (1898-1987) disavowed the executive order and physically banned Meredith from registering. President Kennedy responded by federalizing the Mississippi National Guard and sending U.S. Army troops to protect Meredith. After days of white violence and riots, Meredith, escorted by federal field marshals, presented herself on October 1, 1962.
Two men were killed and more than 300 injured in the riots. After earning credits in the Army and Jackson State College, Meredith was eligible to graduate the following August, which he did without incident. LDF is completely independent and separate from the NAACP. The DFL has also consistently fought to remove barriers to the full political participation of all Americans in our nation`s democratic processes. In 1943, Thurgood Marshall succeeded in convincing the Supreme Court in Smith v. Allwright, that Texas` refusal to allow African Americans to participate in the Democratic primaries violated the 15th Amendment. In 1965, LDF filed a lawsuit to prevent disruptions to Dr. King de Selma`s election march in Montgomery, Alabama, shortly after the infamous “Bloody Sunday” episode, when protesters were beaten by police officers while attempting to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge.