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The ACLU, the NAACP, and the ILD

An awakening sense of civil rights consciousness lay behind the creation of special- interest litigation groups, which turned to the judicial process to reach goals otherwise denied to them through the regular political process. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had its origins among the opponents of World War I, who in 1914 had organized the American League for the Limitation of Armaments, which was soon renamed the American Union Against Militarism. Roger Baldwin, a social worker and one of the founders of the union, gave particular attention to the legal needs of conscientious objectors who refused military service. Conservatives in the union objected to Baldwin's activities, and in 1920, after several reorganizations, Baldwin founded the ACLU.

The ACLU organized legal talent on a systematic basis to safeguard individual liberties. The abolitionists of the 1840s and 1850s had undertaken such activity, but they lacked the central organization and careful attention to the legal process that characterized the ACLU's work. The ACLU became a prototype of public-interest litigation groups after World War II. It had in-house counsel to argue important

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national cases, while it enlisted local members to provide legal assistance and to monitor violations of speech, press, religious freedom, and the rights of the accused.

The NAACP applied a similar scheme to the promotion of black civil rights. The association had its origins with the Niagara Movement, which famed black leader W. E. B. Du Bois founded in 1905. Four years later, a band of blacks and whites, including Moorfield Storey and Du Bois, founded the NAACP. Storey's skills as a litigator and his national prestige proved invaluable. The NAACP organized local branches, as had the ACLU, and relied on them to conduct investigations and to furnish local lawyers who would make preliminary arguments. Storey provided directions about constitutional strategy. He also frequently handled cases on appeal to the Supreme Court, either directly by arguing the case himself or in filing amicus curiae (i.e., as a friend of the Court) briefs to support other counsel actually making the argument.

The NAACP adopted a strategy of gradualism, working in steps to build fuller protection of black rights by incremental expansion of the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (against the most blatant forms of segregation) and the Fifteenth Amendment (against state laws disfranchising blacks). Louis Marshall, a prominent Jewish lawyer from New York City who had fought against anti-Semitism in the legal profession, joined Storey as the association's leading litigators.

Storey and Marshall both died in 1929, and their deaths opened a new phase in the history of the NAACP's legal campaign against racism. The association adopted a more aggressive litigation strategy, one based on establishing that separate facilities had to be truly equal. To support its expanded efforts, the association's legal advisory committee, composed of the most distinguished white civil rights and civil liberties lawyers of the era ( Clarence Darrow, Arthur Garfield Hays, and Morris Ernst), appealed to the American Fund for Public Service, whose chief administrator was Roger Baldwin, for more than $400,000. Although Baldwin was sympathetic to the NAACP's cause, he also believed that the NAACP placed too much emphasis on change through the law and not enough on direct social action. As a result, the fund awarded the NAACP only a quarter of its request.



With this modest donation, the NAACP created a Legal Defense Fund and hired attorneys to undertake a systematic attack on segregation and disfranchisement. Nathan Margold oversaw the Legal Defense Fund's operations until 1933, when he left to join Franklin Roosevelt's administration. Charles Houston, Jr., the Harvard-trained son of a prominent black attorney from the District of Columbia, then took charge. Houston was dean of the Howard University Law School, where he upgraded the quality of legal education for blacks. Houston, unlike Storey, brought more black lawyers into NAACP cases, including such notable figures as Thurgood Marshall, who became in the 1940s and 1950s the NAACP's chief litigator. Houston and Marshall turned law practice for these black civil rights lawyers into "a mission of consuming social and personal significance." 38

Like Baldwin, radical lawyers within the Communist party judged the gradualist policies of the NAACP inadequate. The party's concern with blacks was a mix of pragmatism and sentiment. Blacks were a fertile ground for recruitment and the discrimination directed against them was evidence of the nation's corrupt capitalist economy. Blacks were, according to the party, "class war prisoners." 39 The party was never fully persuaded of the wisdom of legal action against the existing political order, but, like the ACLU and the NAACP, it recognized the value of proceeding to its

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objectives through the courts and laws. In 1925, the party formed the International Labor Defense (ILD) based on support from Communists and non-Communists alike. William L. Patterson, a black attorney from Harlem who had participated in the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, became the ILD's director in 1932. Patterson's objective was to secure immediate, tangible results for blacks, and many of them found this message appealing in comparison with promises made by other left-wing groups about racial change after the class revolution.

 


Date: 2015-01-29; view: 748


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