Jack Greenberg
Personal Information
Description
Jack Greenberg is an American attorney and legal scholar. He was the Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 1961 to 1984, succeeding Thurgood Marshall. He was involved in numerous crucial cases, including Brown v. Board of Education. In all, he has argued 40 civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He is Alphonse Fletcher Jr. Professor of Law Emeritus at Columbia Law School, and has previously served as dean of Columbia College and vice dean of Columbia Law School. Greenberg has varied intellectual interests: aside from several books on law and civil rights, including Crusaders in the Courts, he has written a cookbook (Dean Cuisine, with Harvard Law School Dean James Vorenberg, 1990), and appeared as a panelist for a New York Times tasting of Oregon pinot noir. He also edited Franz Kafka: The Office Writings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) with two other scholars. Source: wikipedia
Books
Crusaders in the courts
This book is both a powerful personal memoir and the definitive history of an organization that helped change American society. Jack Greenberg was a key figure at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) for some thirty-five years. Most of the cases we associate from that period - school integration, equal employment, fair housing, voter registration - were LDF cases, either argued by Greenberg himself or litigated under his direction. Greenberg represented Martin Luther King, Jr., in Birmingham and won for him the right to march from Selma to Montgomery. Under Greenberg's leadership, the LDF forced the University of Mississippi to admit James Meredith and integrated the University of Alabama when George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door. Greenberg won the cases in which the Supreme Court repudiated the "all deliberate speed" doctrine, which had made school desegregation intolerably slow. Through the 1970s and 1980s, LDF tackled most of the important cases that enforced the new civil rights legislation of the 1960s involving public accommodations, employment, education, and health care, and started the campaigns for prisoners' rights and against capital punishment. More than a history of the litigation that made the LDF so important, the book offers unique insights into its strategies, courtroom techniques, values, and personal relationships. Filled with stories only Greenberg could tell of his experiences with Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr., Marian Wright Edelman, Lani Guinier, Roy Wilkins, Vernon Jordan, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Lyndon Johnson, and scores of others, Crusaders in the Courts is an epic saga of a critical period in American history as well as the poignant personal story of the evolution of a white Jewish lawyer into a major civil rights advocate.
Brown v. Board of Education
The effects of desegregation and the legacy of the civil rights movement continue to influence American race relations more than thirty years after Brown v. Board of Education, arguably the most significant legal decision of the twentieth century. This brief volume reprints documents from and about the Brown case along with a number of relevant works by W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and the NAACP to illustrate the myriad responses - then and now - to the African American struggle for equality. A general introduction analyzes the case's legal precedents and situates the case in the historical context of Jim Crow discrimination and the burgeoning development of the NAACP. Photographs, a collection of political cartoons, a chronology, questions for consideration, a bibliography, and an index are also included.