- Person
- Jack Greenberg
- Lived
- 1924–2016
- Field
- Civil rights law
- From
- American
The story
Brown v. Board of Education became a model for many later campaigns of strategic, or impact, litigation, and Jack Greenberg helped spread that model. The Legal Defense Fund regards him as a father of civil rights legal organizations. He was a founding member of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and of Human Rights Watch, and he helped support and shape the formation of the Asian American Legal Defense Fund and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund, now LatinoJustice.
Each of these groups adapted the approach Greenberg had practised for decades at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund: careful, case-by-case litigation designed to change the law for whole communities.
He also carried his experience abroad. Greenberg took part in human rights missions to the Soviet Union, Poland, South Africa, the Philippines, Korea, Nepal and elsewhere. At Columbia Law School he taught human rights law and a course on South Africa's post-apartheid constitution, and he taught as a visiting professor in Japan, Germany and Israel, including at the University of Tokyo, LMU Munich, the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
In his later years he supported the efforts of the Roma in Europe, who saw parallels between their struggle and the legal battles African Americans had fought in the civil rights era. Raised in a family committed to fairness and justice, Greenberg saw a strong resemblance between antisemitism and the oppression of Black Americans, and believed the tools of the civil rights movement could help others.
His work beyond the Fund was widely recognised. In 1996 the American Bar Association gave him its Thurgood Marshall Award for his long-term contributions to civil rights, civil liberties and human rights, and in 1998 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. When President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2001, he praised Greenberg as a crusader for freedom and equality in both the courtroom and the classroom.
Why it matters
Greenberg spread the model of strategic civil rights litigation to new communities in the United States and to oppressed minorities abroad.
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 Furman v. Georgia in 1972Jack Greenberg argued Furman v. Georgia (1972), in which the Supreme Court held that the death penalty as then applied was cruel and unusual punishment.
- 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.
Sources
- LDF Remembers Civil Rights Icon Jack Greenberg NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
- Jack Greenberg (lawyer) Wikipedia
- Brown v. Board of Education Wikipedia
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