30 April 2008
On the Front Lines with Thurgood Marshall
An Interview with Jack Greenberg
(The following interview is taken from the U.S. Department of State publication, Justice for All: The Legacy of Thurgood Marshall.)
Jack Greenberg was a 27-year-old lawyer in 1954 when he worked with Thurgood Marshall on the Brown v. Board of Education case, where the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation was unconstitutional. In this interview, Greenberg shares his thoughts on the legacy of Thurgood Marshall. A professor of law at Columbia University in New York City, Greenberg is the author of several books, including Crusaders in the Courts: Legal Battles of the Civil Rights Movement (2004).
Alexandra Abboud, a staff editor with the U.S. State Department's Bureau of International Information Programs, conducted the interview with Mr. Greenberg.
Question: What would you say was the historical and social significance of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision?
MR. GREENBERG: Brown was a school segregation case that said that the laws in place in the Southern part of the United States which prohibited blacks and whites from going to school together were unconstitutional. But more importantly, the Brown case was like an ice breaker going through the frozen sea of racism. It broke up the racist system that was essentially congealed into the American polity. We had Southern senators who were elected by whites only, and they kept becoming elected and reelected, and their power depended upon them excluding blacks from political participation. The Brown case broke all that up.
Question: What were some of Thurgood Marshall's strengths as an attorney that helped win the Brown case?
MR. GREENBERG: Thurgood Marshall was focused. He always believed in racial integration and wanted to strike down the segregation laws and practices within the United States. I would liken him to General George Marshall during the Second World War. He was the one who got all the troops together from all different areas, competencies, and abilities and melded them into a focused unit.
We worked with law professors and practitioners, social psychologists, and historians. He was like the orchestra conductor who brought everyone together and focused them into a single melody.
Question: The Plessy V. Ferguson case in 1896 resulted in the "separate but equal doctrine," which said that segregation of blacks and whites was legal as long as the separate facilities were of equal quality. In the Brown case, Marshall made the argument for the first time that "separate," by definition, could not be equal. Could you explain how Marshall and his legal team decided that it was time to make the challenge with Brown?
MR. GREENBERG: In 1935, there was a Maryland state case involving the admission of a black student to the University of Maryland Law School that Marshall won. The student was admitted because there was no law school for blacks. That case never even went to the Supreme Court; it was won in the Maryland state courts. In 1939 there was a case in Missouri which went to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the University of Missouri was ordered to admit a black to the University of Missouri Law School because there was no comparable facility for blacks within the state of Missouri.
Then in 1950 there were two cases, one out of Texas and one from Oklahoma. As the Texas case proceeded, the state, seeing the handwriting on the wall, built a law school for blacks. It had two rooms, didn't have a law library, didn't have a law review, had no alumni, but the state argued that was equal, which was a ridiculous claim. And the Supreme Court ruled that there is a lot more than just books, bricks, and the mortar involved in evaluating education. There are the intangibles of your relationships with other students and what you learn from them and the lifelong associations that you make while in school.
In the other case, a black student was excluded from the University of Oklahoma Graduate School of Education. As the case went on, they didn't build another school for him; instead they allowed him to sit in the back of the room just outside the door and look in. Ultimately he was admitted into the classroom and to a seat which was marked for "Negroes only." And the Supreme Court said that (action) separated him from the others in a way that interfered with his ability to learn.
So the court was moving more and more towards recognizing the intangible aspects of education and saying that no matter what you did, you could not be equal so long as you were keeping people separate.
In the Brown case, the momentum of those earlier cases, or the implication of those cases, was made explicit; separate never could be equal.
Question: What is the historical legacy of the Legal Defense Fund at the NAACP?
MR. GREENBERG: The work of the LDF showed that law could accomplish a great deal. It was the first public-interest law firm and it institutionalized public-interest law. It won decisions in the Supreme Court saying that the practice of public-interest law is a constitutional right and brought an end to racial segregation. Today, we have this great proliferation of public-interest law firms all over the country, which represent a wide variety of political and social issues.
Question: You're a professor at Columbia University Law School. Are there many students today interested in practicing civil rights law?
MR. GREENBERG: An enormous number of students are still interested in practicing public-interest law. When I first came to Columbia University, I started a public-interest law program that offers public-interest fellowships and internships during the summer. The program now enrolls hundreds of students. In fact, there's so much interest in public-interest law, there's not enough room to accommodate all who really want to be in it.
