A New York childhood
Jack Greenberg was born in New York City on December 22, 1924, to Jewish parents who had come from Poland and Romania. He grew up in Brooklyn and the Bronx; his father was an accountant, and his brother, Daniel S. Greenberg, became a well-known science journalist. In his memoir, Crusaders in the Courts, Greenberg wrote that he developed early in life an acute awareness of disadvantage and inequality, and he later spoke of being raised in a family committed to fairness and justice.
He entered Columbia College intending to follow his father into accounting. The college’s Core Curriculum and humanities classes changed his direction, turning his interests toward questions of rights and justice.
War in the Pacific
Greenberg’s studies were interrupted by the Second World War. He served in the U.S. Navy as a deck officer on a tank landing ship in the Pacific, took part in the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and commanded a landing craft in the invasion of Iheya Jima, one of the final operations of the war. He was disturbed by the open racial prejudice he saw in the Navy, and was once threatened with a court-martial for shouting at a superior officer in defence of a Black crewman he believed was being mistreated.
Years later, when students protested as he arrived to teach a course at Harvard, a reporter asked whether he had been frightened to walk past them. “No” he replied, “I was on the beach at Iwo Jima.”
Into the Legal Defense Fund
After the war Greenberg completed his Columbia degree and entered Columbia Law School, graduating in 1948 as a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. A course run by Professor Walter Gellhorn placed students with civil rights organisations, and Greenberg wrote briefs for the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Jewish Congress and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, known as LDF. On Gellhorn’s recommendation, Thurgood Marshall hired him in 1949. He was, for a time, the only white lawyer on LDF’s legal staff.
Greenberg later described his early appearances before the Supreme Court as almost a religious experience. Before he ever argued there, he recalled, he felt so much awe in the courtroom that he reached up to check whether he was wearing a yarmulke, as if he were in a synagogue.
Brown v. Board of Education
LDF’s campaign against legal segregation came to a head in the group of cases decided together as Brown v. Board of Education. Greenberg, then twenty-seven, was the youngest member of the legal team. His principal contribution was in Delaware, in Gebhart v. Belton, where, working with the Delaware lawyer Louis Redding, he argued that Black children had the right to attend the white schools in their own neighbourhoods; a state judge found that the Black schools offered far less than the white ones and ordered the children admitted. In December 1952, eleven days before his twenty-eighth birthday, Greenberg argued the Delaware case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
He also worked to bring social science into the courtroom, gathering psychologists and sociologists who could testify to the damage segregation did to children. On May 17, 1954, the Court ruled unanimously that segregated public schools were unconstitutional. Greenberg was the last surviving lawyer to have argued in Brown.
Thurgood Marshall’s successor
When Marshall became a federal judge in 1961, he chose Greenberg to succeed him as director-counsel of LDF. The appointment of a white Jewish lawyer to lead the country’s foremost Black civil rights legal organisation caused friction in both the African-American and the Jewish communities, and the question of whether a white man should hold the post would recur as the movement changed in the late 1960s. Greenberg led LDF for twenty-three years, until 1984, longer than anyone before or since.
Those years spanned the most intense period of the civil rights movement. In 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. asked LDF to handle all the demonstration cases involving his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Greenberg represented King and the Selma voting rights marchers in 1965. He opened LDF’s Washington office in 1969 to work on federal policy, and after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 he set LDF the goal of filing a thousand employment discrimination cases within a year; it filed some 850.
Forty cases before the Supreme Court
In all, Greenberg argued forty cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and won the great majority of them. Meredith v. Fair (1962) opened the way for James Meredith to enrol as the first Black student at the University of Mississippi. Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education (1969) ordered school systems to end segregation “at once” after fifteen years of delay. Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971) held that employment tests with a discriminatory impact could be unlawful even without proof of intent, a principle that reshaped American employment law. In Furman v. Georgia (1972) the Court found the death penalty as then applied unconstitutional, halting executions nationwide for four years.
Beyond the Supreme Court, Greenberg oversaw hundreds of cases in the lower courts on voting rights, equal pay, fair housing, access to medical care, juries and public facilities. As the New York Times later summarised, he helped achieve through the courts what the political system had denied Southern Black Americans.
Builder of a movement
Greenberg believed the LDF model could serve other communities. He was a founding member of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and of Human Rights Watch, and he supported the creation of the Asian American Legal Defense Fund and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund, today LatinoJustice. He took part in human rights missions to the Soviet Union, Poland, South Africa, the Philippines, South Korea and Nepal, and in later life worked with Roma activists in Europe, who saw parallels between their struggle and the American civil rights movement.
In his memoir he reflected on his position as a Jew from the Bronx working inside the Black freedom struggle, and on the role Jews played in the civil rights movement. He saw a strong resemblance between antisemitism and the oppression of Black Americans. He slept in segregated hotels and ate in segregated restaurants on the Black side of the color line while travelling for cases in the South.
His reforming instincts reached into civic life as well. He drafted a New York City law denying tax exemptions to private clubs that discriminated on the basis of race or sex, and founded the Earl Warren Legal Training Program. Columbia awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1984 for his work in furthering social equality, and he later received honorary degrees from Howard University and the University of Notre Dame. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998, and in May 2014, on the sixtieth anniversary of Brown, he was honoured by President Barack Obama.
Professor and dean
After leaving LDF in 1984 Greenberg joined Columbia Law School, where he had taught as an adjunct since 1970, as professor and vice dean, and he later held the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. professorship. From 1989 to 1993 he was dean of Columbia College, where he pressed to diversify the faculty and student body. He founded the law school’s Human Rights Internship Program, which has placed more than 1,500 students with organisations around the world, and taught courses ranging from civil procedure to a seminar on “Kafka and the Law.” He co-edited Franz Kafka’s office writings and, with the Harvard Law dean James Vorenberg, wrote a cookbook, Dean Cuisine. His books include Race Relations and American Law (1959), an early comprehensive survey of the field, and Judicial Process and Social Change (1985), alongside Crusaders in the Courts, which remains a standard history of the litigation campaign against segregation.
His earlier teaching had not been without controversy. In the early 1980s, when he and Julius Chambers were appointed to teach a course on race and the law at Harvard Law School, Black students boycotted it in protest at the school’s failure to hire Black faculty.
Family, death and legacy
Greenberg’s first marriage, to Sema Ann Tanzer, ended in divorce in 1970. He then married Deborah Cole, herself a civil rights lawyer and former LDF attorney, and adopted her two children; they were married for forty-six years. A son from his first marriage, Josiah, died in 2011. Greenberg died at his home in New York on October 12, 2016, at the age of ninety-one, after suffering from Parkinson’s disease.
He received the American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award in 1996 and the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2001, when President Bill Clinton called him a crusader for freedom and equality for more than half a century. LDF’s president, Sherrilyn Ifill, remembered him as a key architect of modern civil rights law. The principles he argued, that segregation is unconstitutional, that discrimination can be proved by its effects, that equal citizenship must be real rather than formal, remain foundations of American law.
Sources & further reading
Jack Greenberg (lawyer), Wikipedia · Jack Greenberg ’45, LAW’48 obituary, Columbia College Today · LDF Remembers Civil Rights Icon Jack Greenberg, NAACP Legal Defense Fund · Noted civil-rights litigator who worked with Thurgood Marshall dies, ABA Journal · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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