- Person
- Jack Greenberg
- Lived
- 1924–2016
- Field
- Civil rights law
- From
- American
The story
Jack Greenberg led the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund as Director-Counsel from 1961 to 1984, succeeding Thurgood Marshall. Under his leadership the Fund's work reached beyond school desegregation into employment, health care and criminal justice, including a sustained challenge to the death penalty.
In the early 1970s more than 600 people were on death row in the United States. In most states juries decided between life and death without a separate sentencing phase, and in 1971 the Supreme Court had ruled that jurors could use broad discretion without guidance. That raised serious concern that race and money could influence who was sentenced to die.
In 1972 Greenberg argued Furman v. Georgia, which the Court heard together with two other cases, Jackson v. Georgia and Branch v. Texas. In a short unsigned opinion, the Court held that imposing the death penalty in these cases was cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. All five justices in the majority wrote separately, producing more than 233 pages, the longest set of opinions the Court had ever issued. Justice Byron White found no meaningful basis for telling apart the few cases in which death was imposed from the many in which it was not.
The ruling invalidated the death sentences of nearly 700 people and brought a nationwide halt to executions. The Legal Defense Fund calls it a major victory that suspended the death penalty throughout the country for four years. In that time 35 states and the federal government wrote new laws, and in 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Court upheld statutes that guided juries' decisions. Even so, Furman reshaped capital trials across the country, and in 1977 the Fund won Coker v. Georgia, which barred the death penalty for rape, its most racially disproportionate use.
Greenberg wrote articles on capital punishment among his many publications, and Furman followed closely on his success in Griggs v. Duke Power Company the year before. Over his career he argued forty cases before the Supreme Court and won almost all of them.
Why it matters
Furman made the fairness of capital punishment a central question in American law and forced states to set standards for life-and-death decisions.
About Jack Greenberg
Youngest lawyer on the Brown v. Board of Education team, Thurgood Marshall’s successor at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and advocate in forty Supreme Court cases.
More about Jack Greenberg
- Jack Greenberg won the order to desegregate schools at onceIn Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education (1969), Jack Greenberg won a Supreme Court order that segregated school systems must end at once.
- Jack Greenberg argued 40 civil rights cases in top courtAt 27, Jack Greenberg was the youngest lawyer on the team that won Brown v. Board of Education; he went on to argue 40 civil rights cases before the Supreme Court.
- Jack Greenberg chronicled the civil rights legal revolutionJack Greenberg's book Crusaders in the Courts tells how a dedicated band of lawyers fought the civil rights revolution, and is regarded as the definitive history of the Legal Defense Fund.
- Jack Greenberg won Griggs v. Duke Power on fair hiringIn Griggs v. Duke Power Company (1971), Jack Greenberg's Legal Defense Fund won a ruling barring employers from relying on tests with a discriminatory impact.
- Martin Luther King Jr. called on Jack Greenberg's lawyersIn 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. asked Jack Greenberg and the Legal Defense Fund to handle all demonstration cases involving the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
- Jack Greenberg's case opened Ole Miss to James MeredithJack Greenberg argued Meredith v. Fair, the case that led to James Meredith's admission to the University of Mississippi, a first step in integrating the university.
- Navy officer Jack Greenberg stood up for a Black sailorServing in the US Navy in World War II, Jack Greenberg risked a court-martial by shouting at a superior officer in defense of a Black crewman he felt was mistreated.
- Jack Greenberg took civil rights law to the worldJack Greenberg helped shape new legal defense funds for Asian American and Puerto Rican communities and joined human rights missions from South Africa to the Soviet Union.
Sources
- Jack Greenberg (lawyer) Wikipedia
- LDF Remembers Civil Rights Icon Jack Greenberg NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
- Furman v. Georgia Wikipedia
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