NAACP Legal Department &
Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF)
1930s-1970

Legal Department

With federal civil rights legislation blocked by southern filibusters and few state legislatures receptive to racial-justice initiatives, by the 1930s the NAACP's primary focus has become judicial challenges to segregation and racial discrimination, and defense of nonwhites facing racially-motivated persecution by police and courts.

The NAACP's chief lawyer is Special Counsel Charles Hamilton Houston — formerly dean of Howard Law School. As the number of cases spiral upward in the 1930s, he recruits Thurgood Marshall and other Howard Law School students to form an NAACP legal department capable of handling the increasing load. In some instances, the Legal Department itself takes the leading role in initiating and arguing a legal case, in others it pays local lawyers to provide legal defense for individuals or handle cases prompted or brought by local organizations.

While their efforts are often defeated by the systemic racism that permeates America's all-white judiciary, they do manage to win some significant victories, among which are:

 

Legal Defense & Education Fund (LDF)

Depression-era poverty causes a sharp drop in NAACP dues income. Lawsuits and legal defense efforts do not come cheap, and the NAACP legal department struggles to fund its activities. In the mid-1930s, federal tax laws are significantly changed — limits are placed on the legislative lobbying activities of nonprofit corporations like the NAACP. Commercial corporations, however, are allowed to deduct charitable donations. In response to those changes, in 1940 Thurgood Marshall establishes the nonprofit NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (abbreviated LDF) to raise funds from big donors and corporations exclusively for the NAACP's legal program. [1]

[In modern terms, both the NAACP and LDF are nonprofit organizations. The NAACP is a "501c4" corporation while the LDF is a "501c3." Both are exempt from paying taxes on their income. But a 501c3 like LDF cannot endorse or campaign for political candidates and there are limits on its lobbying and political advocacy, while a 501c4 like the NAACP has more latitude to endorse, campaign, lobby, and advocate. Individuals and corporations can deduct donations to 501c3 organizations like the LDF from their taxes, but they cannot deduct donations to 501c4 groups like the NAACP. Therefore, it is much easier for the LDF to obtain large contributions from wealthy business and individual donors that it is for the NAACP.

Over time, it has become common for organizations engaged in social and political activities to have both 501c3 and a 501c4 arms. After, the LDF and NAACP sever the organizational links between them in 1957, the NAACP forms a new 501c3 of their own — the NAACP Empowerment Programs.]

In addition to Thurgood Marshall, the LDF employs five staff lawyers in New York. It also pays the fees for local attorneys in private practice who argue LDF-supported cases in their home states where they are members of the bar.

The LDF often takes on and pays for cases of poor Blacks who have been denied their civil or constitution rights, or who are being persecuted because of their race. And as the NAACP's legal arm, the LDF takes the lead in civil rights litigation and legal defense from 1940 to 1957. Among its most significant cases during this period are: [2]

By the mid-1950s, white-supremacists in the South are fuming with rage over:
 The Brown decision
 The Montgomery Bus Boycott
 The attempt by Autherine Lucy to enroll in the University of Alabama.
 The Desegregation of Little Rock High School

The focus of their fury is the NAACP.

Led by the newly-formed White Citizens Councils (WCC), they determine to destroy the NAACP in the South. To that end, they launch a coordinated effort to outlaw or suppress it through legislation, regulation, and lawsuits.

WCC chapters encourage state Attorneys General to unilaterally classify the NAACP as a 'subversive organization.' Once they've declared it to be 'subversive,' they then demand it turn over to them their membership and donor lists. Which, as everyone knows, they will pass on to the WCC who will then organize economic retaliation against the individuals on the lists — firing them from their jobs, evicting them from their homes, boycotting their businesses, harassing them with phone calls and threats. When NAACP officials refuse to expose their membership and donor lists, state courts then levy crippling fines and issue injunctions prohibiting the organization from continuing to operate in the state.

And in an effort to disbar local lawyers who argue cases for, or receive fees from the LDF, operatives for the WCC file bogus charges of ethics and misconduct violations against them with state Bar Association officials.

The NAACP fights back with lawsuits of its own, but those suits take years to wend their weary way through first the state court system and then the federal all the way to the Supreme Court.

 

Separation of NAACP and LDF

WCC influence is not confined solely to the former slave-states. In Washington DC — which in 1956 is still a thoroughly segregated southern city — Senator Harry F. Byrd (D-VA) is the powerful chair of the Senate Finance Committee which oversees the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and approves its budget. He is also an adamant segregationist, White Citizen Council ally, and leader of the South's "Massive Resistance" campaign against school integration. He pressures the IRS to launch an investigation of the NAACP's tax-exempt status because of its relationship with the LDF. [3]

With both the NAACP and LDF under attack by the IRS, and local lawyers who take LDF cases threatened with disbarment, the LDF legally divorces itself from the NAACP, establishing separate offices, officers, and board members — though it's clear that so long as Marshall remains its Director, LDF policy will parallel NAACP policy. Its letterhead and materials continue to identify it as the 'NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc' (or sometimes just 'NAACP Legal Defense Fund Inc.') but most people simply think of it, and continue to call it, the 'NAACP.' Sophisticated Freedom Movement activists, however, colloquially refer to it as the 'Inc Fund' (pronounced 'ink fund') to distinguish it from the NAACP proper.

During the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, the LDF is the primary provider of legal assistance to Freedom Movement organizations and activists. Among the many cases they handle are:

  1. 1956-1958. NAACP v. Alabama defending the NAACP against the state of Alabama's attempt to destroy it. Either by forcing it to turn over its membership list to the state which would expose members to legal persecution and terrorist violence from the Ku Klux Klan; or be shutdown for defying a state order to do so. [14]

  2. 1961-1962. Meredith v. Fair defending James Meredith's right to enroll in the University of Mississippi and to desegregate 'Ole Miss. It takes the United States Army to enforce the desegregation order and at least two people are killed the ensuing white-supremacist riot. [15]

  3. 1964. Hamm v. City of Rock Hill in which the Supreme Court rules that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires setting aside (dismissing) all prosecutions and convictions of demonstrators who have been arrested for protesting segregation. (Arrests connected to voter registration efforts are later transferred to federal court and dismissed under authority of the Civil Rights Act of 1957.) [16]

  4. 1965. Williams v. Wallace wins a federal court order prohibiting Alabama Governor Wallace from blocking the The March From Selma to Montgomery. It orders the state of Alabama to protect the marchers and/or allow the federal government to do so. [17]

In 1961, President Kennedy appoints Thurgood Marshal to a federal judgeship and President Johnson later appoints him to the Supreme Court. As a federal judge, Marshall can no longer head the LDF.

Marshall is replaced by Jack Greenberg. Disputes over national policy, priorities, and fundraising, gradually divide the LDF's new leadership from Roy Wilkins and other NAACP national leaders. Eventually, the NAACP recreates its own legal department while the LDF operates as a completely separate and independent organization. (In N.A.A.C.P. v. N.A.A.C.P (1985) the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington DC rules that the LDF may continue to identify itself with the initials 'NAACP.')

 

Additional Information Resources

NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund — History
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

NAACP Documents (includes LDF documents)

Reference, Quotation & Case Information Sources:

  1. Legal Defense Fund History, LDF

  2. 10 Landmark Cases That Show How the NAACP LDF Reshaped Racial Justice, The Root

  3. Keep on keeping on: The NAACP and the implementation of Brown v. Board of Education in Virginia, Brian James Daugherity, College of William & Mary (PDF Download)

  4. Buchanan v. Warley:  OyezCornell LawJustia

  5. Corrigan v. Buckley:  Cornell LawJustia

  6. Shelly v. Kraemer:  OyezCornell LawJustia

  7. Gaines v. Canada:  OyezCornell LawJustia

  8. Hale v. Kentucky:  Cornell LawJustia

  9. Brown v. Board of Education:  LDFNPSOyezCornell LawJustia

  10. Chambers v. Florida:  Cornell LawJustia

  11. Fikes v. Alabama:  OyezCornell LawJustia

  12. Smith v. Allwright:  LDFOyezCornell LawJustia

  13. Browder v. Gayle:  King Research Institute (Stanford Univ.)OyezJustia

  14. NAACP v. Alabama:  Cornell LawJustiaBallotpedia (PDF download)

  15. Meredith v. Fair:  USGSAJustia

  16. Hamm v. City of Rock Hill:  OyezCornell LawJustia

  17. Williams v. Wallace:  Cornell LawJustia

  18. Fair Housing Act.

 


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