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NAACP LEGAL DEFENSE & EDUCATIONAL FUND

The NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., was founded in 1939 by board members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to conduct the legal program of the association through a corporation qualified to receive tax deductible contributions. The association was not tax exempt, because it lobbied. Board members of the association served on the board of the Fund; the Fund's director and some of its lawyers also were employees of the association.

In 1957 the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) objected to the interlocking staff and board because it enabled an organization not tax exempt to influence one entitled to tax exemption. The IRS required termination of the interlocking arrangement. Thereafter the Fund and the association were no longer formally linked, and the Fund functioned entirely independently with its own board, staff, budget, and policies. The Fund has since represented individuals and organizations with no relationship to the association at all as well as members and branches of the association.

In 1984 the Fund's staff consisted of twenty-four lawyers, with offices in New York and Washington, D.C., and several hundred cooperating lawyers across the United States. Its budget was $6.7 million. It has served as a model for the public interest law movement generally, including other legal defense funds, such as those dealing with discrimination against Hispanics, Asians, women, the handicapped, homosexuals, and the aged, as well as public interest firms representing environmental, consumer, migrant worker, and other groups.

The Fund's director-counsel was THURGOOD MARSHALL, who served until 1961 and was succeeded by Jack Greenberg, who directed the organization until 1984, when he was succeeded by Julius L. Chambers. The Fund has been involved in most of the leading cases dealing with racial discrimination in the United States, including BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION (1954), which held unconstitutional racial SEGREGATION in public education, the principle of which was ultimately extended to all other governmental activities. Brown was the culmination of a planned litigation effort which built upon earlier Fund cases involving RACIAL DISCRIMINATION in graduate and professional schools. In the 1960s, the Fund provided representation in most of the cases generated by the CIVIL RIGHTS movement, including representation of MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. , Thereafter, following passage of the Civil Rights Acts of the mid-1960s, the Fund brought most of the leading cases enforcing those laws. The Fund has represented civil rights claimants in more than 2,000 cases dealing with education, employment, VOTING RIGHTS, housing, CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, health care, and other areas of the law.