what strategy did the naacp use to try to end segregation?what strategy did the naacp use to try to end segregation?

But the statute provided only $10,000 for scholarships: a paltry $200 each for up to 50 black students seeking a professional education out of state. The third prong of the NAACP's attack was based on the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause. Shortly after Sweatt, Marshall, 43 other attorneys, and 14 branch and local NAACP presidents convened to develop the next phase of the legal strategy. The second was to bring cases that would coax the Supreme Court into doing what it had assiduously avoided doing in Sweatt: overturning Plessy. There was no state school for the education of Negro lawyers. Segregation in graduate and professional education was as common in the South as segregation in elementary and secondary schools. Eventually, the students sent a letter to the NAACP's special counsel for the Southeast region. True, the NAACP had taken some chunks out of the doctrine with Murray and other cases. While the Prince Edward County case was pending, a separate case was filed in the District of Columbia. arguing legal cases in court Read this quotation. Of course, the trial court found that the new school provided an education equal to that provided by the state university. Two Richmond lawyers, Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson, served in that capacity. It examined the intangible characteristics of a legal education. Two things were left to the NAACP. They all had a common aim: the elimination of Plessy v. Ferguson's "separate but equal" doctrine. The black doll was selected when the children were asked which doll looked "bad.". -A. Philip Randolph, 1940 When Did Thurgood Marshall Establish LDF? Log in for more information. The aim was to produce, in the words of the conference report, "education on a nonsegregated basis that no relief other than that will be acceptable.". Among its most significant achievements was the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's challenge to end segregation in . Since its inception, the NAACP has worked to achieve its goals through the judicial system, lobbying and peaceful protests. The entirely part-time faculty had no offices at the black school. States were being prodded toward making some progress in the equalization of schools, libraries, and recreational and other facilities. By the time of the trial, only 17 days after the scholarships became available, 380 African-American students had asked for applications, 113 had returned them, and there were still 12 more days during which completed applications would be accepted. Third, the testimony of experts refuted widely held beliefs about the intellectual inferiority of Afro-Americans. . One of the organization's key victories was the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed segregation in public schools. The first part of that argument was based on the equal protection clause. American attitudes toward race had changed since Plessy in 1896, and, in key areas, NAACP attorneys were striking blows against racial discrimination and gaining valuable legal experience along the way. The students were mature. In the NAACPs early decades, its anti-lynching campaign was central to its agenda. But the Court had implicitly accepted the NAACP's first and second arguments in Sweatt, and though it had avoided the third, the due process claim, it had set a standard that was impossible for a segregated system of legal education to meet, for there would always be intangible differences in racially segregated schools. That is, he was qualified by any standard but one. We strive for accuracy and fairness. The court did not condemn the scholarship program as a matter of law. Using a combination of tactics including legal challenges, demonstrations and economic boycotts, the NAACP played an important role in helping end segregation in the United States. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed in 1909 to fight Jim Crow, 20th-century America's experience with petty and not so petty apartheid. What Brown did do was to catalyze a whole new phase of the civil rights movement. The NAACP is the oldest and most recognized civil rights organization in the United States. Restaurants and hotels were segregated, but bus and train station waiting rooms were not. There were those who were pleased with the new progress and reluctant to give up what had been a successful campaign. In Korematsu, the Court stated that while "all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect [t]hat is not to say that all such restrictions are unconstitutional." Cases from across the country would be argued. Professional schools were also a tempting target for another reasonthey carried less emotional baggage. If the Court had ended its analysis there, the Sweatt case would have been just another case upholding the separate but equal doctrine. Who Appointed Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court? It is not as overwhelming a part of American culture as it was throughout most of the 20th century, but still, reports of its total demise are woefully premature. The NAACP could continue to urge the courts to find segregation inherently unconstitutional. How Did Thurgood Marshall Help the NAACP? Also, it was easier to make the case that discrimination was occurring in professional schools. It would be a phase in which the champions of civil rights would continue the struggle for equal rights in the courts and in other venues. By 2022, the NAACP had more than 2,200 branches and more than half a million members worldwide. Popular games such as the original Warcraft games, Starcraft and Civilization allowed. In 1950 there were 300 Negro physicians, 150 African-American lawyers and judges, 150 black college professors, and 2,500 African-American schoolteachers residing in the District of Columbia. At the dawn of the 21st century, nearly half of the black population still lives in communities that are 90 percent or more black. The facts were somewhat different in each case, but the cases were all part of a coordinated strategy directed from the NAACP's headquarters in New York. The segregated law school that Texas reserved for African Americans was unequal. While touching on the general social, political, and economic climate in which the NAACP acted, Mark V. Tushnet emphasizes the internal workings of the organization as revealed in its own documents. An effective way to demonstrate this is to search terms using the search engine on the NAACP's website. What was important was not so much the trial court decision as the record that was produced in the trial. Murray was noteworthy. The school was well equipped, and the grounds were beautifully landscaped. The Court then traced the evolution of the separate but equal doctrine from Plessy through McLaurin (a case decided shortly before Sweatt in which the Court ruled that segregation within a desegregated institution, such as having blacks relegated to the back of a classroom, interfered with the educational process). In many ways it fit Winston Churchill's observation during the Second World War immediately after the allied victory in North Africa. In effect, the NAACP was making the argument it had made before the Texas court that the formula in Plessy was constitutionally malformed and that the 1896 case should be overruled. The NAACP found one in Baltimore resident Donald Murray. There would be even fewer African Americans eligible for admission. Claymont offered several extracurricular activities that were not available at Howard. In representing Sweatt before the Supreme Court, Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall made the same three-part argument that had been rejected by the Texas Court of Civil Appeals. Robert J. Cottrol is Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law and professor of history and sociology at George Washington University. The NAACPs campaign was largely unsuccessful, but it helped raise the new groups public profile.. By 1919, the NAACP had some 90,000 members and more than 300 branches. Over time, the NAACP would become the nation's premier civil rights organization. He was immediately rejected. The court did not hold that another scholarship program would be unconstitutional. Still, state officials recognized that they were on shaky ground, that appellate courts would be more skeptical. In addition, black teachers who acted as plaintiffs in salary equalization suits ran serious risk of being fireda particularly severe risk given the desperate scarcity of jobs in America in the 1930s.*. The Court found, as a threshold matter, that the original intent of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment on the question of segregated schools was not clear. This testimony, and the studies on which it was based, became a key element of the NAACP's evidence in the desegregation cases. Leland B. Ware is Louis L. Redding Chair for the Study of Law and Public Policy at the University of Delaware. This is clear in the language of the appellate opinion. Surprisingly, even the occasional right-wing antigovernment militia will sometimes have a black member or two. Increasingly, access to the courts . The court was forced to confront the constitutional issue. Which the city did four years before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The new school had only one alumnus. He was commissioned as a first lieutenant after attending a training camp for Negro officers in Des Moines, Iowa. Redding was a graduate of Brown University and Harvard Law School and was admitted to practice in Delaware in 1929. Chief Justice Earl Warren read the opinion for a unanimous Court. Racist demagogues were sure to charge that black and white children attending elementary and secondary schools together would lead to the dreaded scourge of race mixing. NAACP lawyers brought the case in state court. Louisiana State University had been ordered by a three-judge federal panel to admit black students to the law school, an order only three months later summarily affirmed by the Supreme Court. In effect, the Supreme Court in Sweatt was going well beyond Murray by saying that segregation in law school is inherently unequal. Updated: March 29, 2023 | Original: October 29, 2009. In addition, he successfully brought lawsuits that integrated other state universities. It was written in a straightforward style that could be understood by the most unsophisticated reader. The Court had interpreted that clause to mean that no state action not grounded in a rational basis could stand constitutional muster. Houston also made the law school library a depository for files on civil rights litigation from around the nation. The NAACP will seek to safe guard the moral and tenure rights of Negro teachers in the assignment of personnel in desegregated systems. Marshalls status as a pillar of the Civil Rights Movement is confirmed and upheld by LDF and other organizations that strive to uphold the principles of civil rights and racial justice. The American Federation of Teachers is a union of professionals that champions fairness; democracy; economic opportunity; and high-quality public education, healthcare and public services for our students, their families and our communities. This rejection of outright racial bigotry even occurs in some quite unexpected precincts in modern America. He concluded that efforts to equalize facilities between black and white schools should continue, but he also recognized (as Margold did) that victories in such cases could cause problems for the long-term goal of eliminating segregation. In 1957, LDF, led by Marshall, became an entirely separate entity from the NAACP with its own leadership and board of directors and has remained a separate organization to this day. The Murray court noted that if Murray were barred from the University of Maryland's law school, he would miss the benefits of a state law school education, specifically gaining a familiarity with the courts of the state in which he intended to practice law. Eventually, six cases would be consolidated and collectively known as Brown v. Board of Education. Marshall was born on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland, to William Marshall, railroad porter, who later worked on the staff of Gibson Island Club, a white-only country club and Norma Williams, a school teacher. University of Maryland President Raymond Pearson informed Murray that while the University of Maryland did not accept black students, Howard University did. The annual expenditures for these schools were $673,850. One of the organizations key victories was the U.S. Supreme Courts 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed segregation in public schools. Today, the NAACP is focused on such issues as inequality in jobs, education, health care and the criminal justice system, as well as protecting voting rights. In 1946 he applied to the all-white law school at the University of Texas. While these cases did not end segregation in Virginia schools, they allowed NAACP lawyers to gain more experience litigating cases, and also marked a . An additional important point should be made. A third of the city's Afro-American population was employed by the federal government. Convinced that the law could be an important tool in the fight against racial repression, Houston began to give the Howard Law School a strong civil rights orientation. The NAACP was established in February 1909 in New York City by an interracial group of activists, partially in response to the 1908 Springfield race riot in Illinois. In 1931, the NAACP's first staff attorney, Nathan Margold, outlined a legal strategy to challenge school segregation. Wells, Archibald Grimke and Mary Church Terrell. In his Bakke dissent, he wrote: In light of the sorry history of discrimination and its devastating impact on the lives of Negroes, bringing the Negro into the mainstream of American life should be a state interest of the highest order. U.S. House of Representatives. Du Bois, Ida B. If the tangible measures of inequality revealed stark differences in resources between the two institutions, there were harder to measure, intangible factors that also marked the black schools inferiority. He did get through. Both were trained at Howard Law School during the years that Charles Houston was dean. There was no shortage of potential cases with which to move the battle forward; segregated elementary and secondary schools existed throughout the South and in other regions as well. Thurgood Marshalls legacy lives on with the Thurgood Marshall Institute, a multidisciplinary center within the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The District of Columbia's desegregation case began when a local barber, Bishop Gardner, organized the Consolidated Parents Group. Gardner's group initiated a boycott of a black high school that was overcrowded and in a state of severe disrepair. Social change had helped bring new allies to the fight against segregation. The disparities were too obvious. They would challenge segregation at small-town lunch counters and risk their lives on the often dangerous back roads of the rural South. The decision would become a catalyst for profound changes in legal norms. By now it was February 1948, and Heman Sweatt's fight to pursue a legal education at the University of Texas had gone on two years. It was the NAACP's first major victory in the campaign against segregated higher education. W.E.B. These kinds of arguments could be challenged, of course, but they would involve the NAACP in long, often hard to prove, fact-specific litigation. Along the way, the civil rights movement would encounter every conceivable kind of resistance from unofficial and official quarters, but it would succeed in winning over new supporters. The NAACPs anti-lynching crusade became a central focus for the group during its early decades. Ultimatelyafter more than 100 years of effortthe NAACP and other groups were able to get a federal anti-lynching law passed and signed by President Joe Biden in 2022. NAACP units throughout the country. In its charter, the NAACP promised to champion equal rights and eliminate racial prejudice, and to advance the interest of colored citizens in regard to voting rights, legal justice and educational and employment opportunities. These cases, Hirabayashi v. United States (1943) and Korematsu v. United States (1944), involved the imposition of curfews, relocation, and confinement of Japanese Americans on the West Coast. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), interracial American organization created to work for the abolition of segregation and discrimination in housing, education, employment, voting, and transportation; to oppose racism; and to ensure African Americans their constitutional rights. Careful selection of the right plaintiff had paid off. It did so in the hopes of dealing a fatal blow to segregation under the equal protection clause. The judge was the same one who had held that the vastly inferior Prairie View school was equal. They are law school graduates and they spend their professional lives working with law school graduates. Was a new building constructed for the white school and not the black one? The boycott took place from December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956, and is regarded as the first large-scale U.S. demonstration against segregation. And there was more. Learn more about the Institutes vision and their fight to continue Thurgood Marshalls honorable mission for racial justice. What was the NAACP? What strategy did the NAACP use to try and end segregation? In doing so, the NAACP placed before the Court the predictable and unavoidable consequence of segregation: inequality. Resistance to racial segregation and discrimination during the pre- and postwar eras of the twentieth century was undertaken by the use of a number of different strategies, including civil disobedience, nonviolent resistance, political marches, boycotts, rallies, and proposed legislation. After two years of inaction, the branch contacted the organization's headquarters in New York and requested assistance in filing a lawsuit. Asked by Justice Felix Frankfurter during the argument what he meant by equal, Mr. Marshall replied, Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time, and in the same place. It was an argument that segregation inherently produced inequality. Today, the NAACP honors its heritage of activism and continues to work for civil rights. Because of these changes, the case was remanded to the trial court to determine if the new school was equal to the one for whites. It was then that Houston decided to make changeschanges that would profoundly influence Howard University's law school and the course of the nation's civil rights law. Anti-Lynching Legislation Renewed. The In all of these tangible factors, the Court found the University of Texas superior. Wiki User. It would do so in large part because the NAACP early on recognized that the courts, despite their racial conservatism, were a potentially potent weapon in the battle for racial change. Hill and Robinson met with the striking students and were impressed by their resolve. Relying heavily on the foundation developed in cases such as McLaurin and Sweatt, as well as the social science evidence presented by Dr. Clark and others, the Court held that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" (italics added). I made up my mind that if I got through this war I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back.". Not surprisingly, terms such as "discrimination," "racism," and "victim" return ample results1,902, 605, and 294, respectively. Given the temper of the times, Margold recognized that it wouldn't do to attack school segregation under any and all circumstances. After all, after nearly half a century, the equal side of separate but equal was finally coming into prominence. With this pronouncement, America stood at the dawn of a new era in race relations. It would be another two years before the U.S. Supreme Court would hear and decide Sweatt v. Painter (1950), winning for him the right to attend the University of Texas. But at the end of the day, "separate but equal" remained entrenched. At Harvard he compiled a brilliant record, graduating in the top five percent of his class and serving as the first Negro editor of the Harvard Law Review. 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