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History > 20th century > USA > Civil rights > Other 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/
497841007/jack-greenberg-civil-rights-icon-who-argued-brown-v-board-dies

 

 

 

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/
jack-greenberg-dead.html

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/us/
jack-greenberg-dead.html

 

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/10/13/
497841007/jack-greenberg-civil-rights-icon-who-argued-brown-v-board-dies

 

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/
story.php?storyId=1898829 - May 17, 2004

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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