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History > USA > Civil rights > Activists
Jack Greenberg 1924-2016
Mr. Greenberg, second from left, in 1952 during the second trial of Walter Lee Irvin, third from left, who had been sentenced to death in a rape case.
Thurgood Marshall is at the far right.
Photograph: Bettmann
Jack Greenberg, a Courthouse Pillar of the Civil Rights Movement, Dies at 91 NYT OCT. 12, 2016 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/us/jack-greenberg-dead.html
Jack Greenberg 1924-2016
one of the lawyers who argued the landmark Supreme Court case that ended federal tolerance of racial segregation in schools.
Greenberg was a giant of the civil rights era.
He argued 40 cases before the nation's highest court, fighting against segregation, employment discrimination and the death penalty.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/10/13/
lawyer who became one of the nation’s most effective champions of the civil rights struggle, leading the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. for 23 years and using the law as a weapon in its fight for racial justice before the United States Supreme Court
(...)
Mr. Greenberg was part of a legendary civil rights legal team assembled by Thurgood Marshall, the founding director-counsel of the legal defense fund and later the first African-American Supreme Court justice.
When Mr. Marshall hired him as an assistant counsel in 1949, Mr. Greenberg was just 24 and the civil rights movement, too, was taking wing.
A son of Jewish immigrants and a product of New York City, he had developed an abiding intolerance of injustice — some of it witnessed in the Navy — that propelled him into law and into Mr. Marshall’s sights.
Mr. Greenberg joined a team that, like him, was idealistic yet pragmatic, deliberate yet unafraid.
Besides Mr. Marshall there were Robert L. Carter, Constance Baker Motley, Spottswood W. Robinson III and others.
Mr. Greenberg was neither the first white nor the first Jew to work for the civil rights of blacks.
But he was one of the most powerful white figures in the movement in the 1960s and ’70s, a distinction that led to friction with both blacks and Jews.
Still, Mr. Greenberg helped achieve through the courts what the political system had denied Southern blacks: voting rights, equal pay for equal work, impartial juries, equal access to medical care, equal access to schools and other benefits of citizenship broadly enjoyed by whites.
The genius of his legal team, Mr. Greenberg told The New York Times in 2014, was “the ability to be creative in matters of legal and social justice.”
At 27, he helped argue two of the five cases that led to the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared an end to the “separate but equal” system of racial segregation in the public schools.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/us/
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/10/13/
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/
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