Scope and Content Note
The records of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund span the years 1915 1968, with the bulk of the material ranging from 1940 to 1960. Consisting of an Office File, Subject File, Legal Case File, Restricted series, and Oversize, these records document the work and procedures of the organization as it combated racial discrimination against African Americans during an era of legal segregation. The fund waged its battle against discrimination in the nation's courts, and in so doing, initiated a public interest legal practice that was unprecedented in American jurisprudence.
This collection is inextricably linked to the records of its parent organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and a full account of most issues will require readers to consult both collections. The relationship between the two entities is documented in the Office File of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund records. Furthermore, the Office File documents the complex organizational and administrative decisions that set the course for the NAACP's legal program during the crucial middle years of the twentieth century. During its first few decades, the NAACP's legal work was often done on an unpaid and voluntary basis. Later, guided by a board of directors and the recommendations of a 1931 report on legal strategy by Nathan Margold, the NAACP began mapping out an ambitious legal program to seek equal justice, full citizenship rights, and an end to racial segregation. It was clear that this legal program required a paid staff and solid funding. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., was formed as a membership corporation in 1939 to take advantage of tax exemptions available to nonprofit, nonpolitical charitable organizations, a tax status that had been denied to the NAACP by the Internal Revenue Service. Commonly known as the "Legal Defense Fund," the "Inc. Fund," or simply "the Fund," its purpose was to obtain income for the NAACP legal program.
In 1940 the U.S. Treasury Department granted tax-exempt nonprofit status to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. Thurgood Marshall was named director of the fund and, concurrently, special counsel to the NAACP. The executive secretary of the NAACP was appointed to the board of directors for the fund. Budgets for the two operations were to remain separate. However, the interlocking boards of directors and shared office space at the NAACP headquarters in New York City meant that the separation was little more than a technicality.
By the early 1950s, the fund was outgrowing its office space and its subsidiary role. The Internal Revenue Service continually questioned the fund's tax-exempt status, since the NAACP and the fund were operated by the same people out of the same office. Reasoning that a move would placate the IRS and ease the crowding, the Legal Defense Fund moved its offices in December 1952. At the time of the move, the staff included Thurgood Marshall, five attorneys, a research assistant, a field worker, a fund-raiser and secretarial and clerical personnel. The Legal Defense Fund staff took a number of NAACP files which it had been reviewing, such as those concerning Josephine Baker's treatment at the Stork Club in New York City, and files pertaining to the Detroit riot of 1943. These records were incorporated into the fund's records and can now be located in the Subject File. Confusion as to which documents belonged where continued to plague both organizations. A courier system was established to exchange mail and other documents twice a day, a necessary expedient since many legal matters were addressed to the NAACP for years to come.
To protect itself and the legal program against charges of stirring up lawsuits, and especially to shield lawyers from disbarment who were associated with its cases, the fund established new procedures in handling litigation. After 1955 it only took cases of indigent African Americans who had been denied a civil or constitution right solely because of race or color and who personally or through their attorneys or immediate family requested the assistance of the Legal Defense Fund. No longer did the fund work at the behest of branch or national officers of the NAACP.
Unlike the NAACP, the Legal Defense Fund did not have branches, but retained services of regional lawyers in California, Virginia, Washington, D.C., Louisiana, and Texas typically to handle cases in federal courts. It also paid and supervised local attorneys who conducted litigation in state courts. Records concerning these attorneys are in the Office File.
Success in court brought intense scrutiny. After the interlocking boards of directors became an issue, the boards of the NAACP and the Legal Defense Fund agreed to separate in late 1956. Marshall became the director of the fund and relinquished his title as special counsel to the NAACP. An office of NAACP General Counsel was created to which Robert Carter was named, bringing an end to Carter's association with the fund. The legal program, in effect, was transferred from the NAACP to the Legal Defense Fund in 1956. When its lease ended in 1957, the fund moved again and opened its new offices in January 1958. This move signaled a break with the parent organization, one that did not cause too much concern so long as Marshall remained director. When he left in 1961 to become a federal judge, the question of the relationship between the two organizations was reconsidered.
Jack Greenberg succeeded Marshall as director of the fund in 1962. Thereafter, the NAACP reestablished its own legal department under the direction of Robert Carter. However, until the mid-1960s, litigation undertaken in the name of the NAACP was handled by Legal Defense Fund lawyers, and documentation of such action is located in the Legal Defense Fund records. The records in the Office File thus represent a period of transition for the NAACP and for the Legal Defense Fund.
The legal program of the NAACP is documented in the Subject File as well as the Legal Case File. Any matter not in the form of a legal proceeding is filed as a subject. Thus, "crime," "soldier troubles," and "veteran's complaints" contain many requests for aid along with nonlegal documents concerning specific cases. Similarly, broad areas of civil rights violations are documented under "armed forces," "discrimination," "housing," "labor," "schools," "transportation" and "voter registration."
The Legal Case File documents cases handled by the fund in its coordinated attack aimed at laws or practices of racial discrimination which limited or prohibited access to education, property, and the political process; or laws which excluded or imposed special restriction on racial groups in domestic relations, criminal law, public accommodations and services, and elsewhere. The strategy was to initiate or counter an interrelated set of cases which would cumulatively bring an end to racial segregation and discrimination.
Cases are filed alphabetically by title in keeping with the original order as established by the Legal Defense Fund. Material within the file is arranged to reflect the development of each case. The emphasis is on chronology and on the progression from unofficial, incomplete, and related material to the official records and the summarized presentations. Therefore, correspondence which is not part of the court record is filed first. Background material is next and comprises a working file of memoranda, notes, data, reports, and drafts. Legal documents are the official documents transmitted to and from the court during legal proceedings. Legal documents can include the following: affidavits, briefs, correspondence, depositions, exhibits, finding of facts, judgments, memoranda, motions, notices, opinions, orders, interrogatories and answers to interrogatories, and trial transcripts. Documents are arranged chronologically or by document type if bulk necessitates, as with some transcript and exhibit books. At case closing, or for particular presentations, various actions and decisions were published in an edited and condensed form and are designated as printed case records.
Occasionally, the case file will include records of litigation from a lower court, counter actions, or related records in test cases. These records are designated related cases and cited thereunder. Related cases are cited by title and may include all of the record types as found in the main case file.
A parenthetical note indicates the general category for the case and the location by state of the proceedings. Cases litigated up to the mid-1960s can be grouped into the following broad categories: armed forces, civil rights protest demonstrations, criminal proceedings, domestic relations, education, elections, housing and real property, labor, public accommodations, recreational facilities, and transportation. See the index appended to the register for a description of these categories and a listing of cases by category and state.
Over 450 cases are represented in the Legal Case File and education cases comprise the largest category. Brown vs. Board of Education is the fund's landmark case, the case that ended racial segregation in the public schools, and yet case files for Brown are not included in this series. They are preserved among the records of the NAACP along with those of other important education cases decided by the Supreme Court including State of Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma (1948), Painter v. Sweatt (1950), and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950). However, records related to the Brown case can be found in the other series in this collection. The Supreme Court took up the school segregation cases consolidated under Brown in the spring term of 1953. Unable to reach a decision, the justices requested that both sides address five questions and reargue the case in the fall term. Records pertaining to the reargument are in the Office File, particularly the extensive records of the Committee on Historical Development. The Court decided the case in May 1954; segregation was ruled to be unconstitutional. But questions remained concerning implementation of the ruling. The court again asked the litigants to argue the case for implementation in what is commonly referred to as Brown II. The Legal Defense Fund organized a Committee of Social Science Consultants to address the questions of implementation. Committee records are located in the Office File. Related documents in the Subject File series are filed under "schools."
Housing and property cases in the Legal Case File series include documents from the NAACP's first case on this issue: Buchanan v. Warley (1917). Public accommodations, transportation, and recreation cases date from the 1950s to the 1960s. Cases concerning elections and voting rights are mostly from the 1940s and 1950s with one large case, Gray v. Main, from 1966. The landmark white primary case of Smith v. Allwright (1944) is located in the NAACP records. Labor cases span the 1930s to the 1950s, however, much of the related material is in the Subject File series, including material on the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union. Cases concerned with the armed forces were litigated primarily in the 1940s and early 1950s, including the Korean War cases reviewed by Thurgood Marshall while investigating combat conditions and court martial proceedings in Korea. Civil rights protest demonstration cases were litigated primarily in the early- to mid 1960s.
Restricted material, consisting of folders removed from the open portion of the collection, is identified in the Container List with an asterisk.