LDF relied upon research by historians like John Hope Franklin, and the work of social science researchers like June Shagaloff. These LDF lawyers were assisted by a brain trust of legal scholars, including future federal district court judges Louis Pollack and Jack Weinstein, along with William Coleman, the first Black person to serve as a Supreme Court law clerk. To litigate these cases, Thurgood Marshall recruited the nation’s best attorneys, including Robert Carter, Jack Greenberg, Constance Baker Motley, Spottswood Robinson, Oliver Hill, Louis Redding, Charles and John Scott, Harold R.

This campaign was conceived in the 1930s by Charles Hamilton Houston, then Dean of Howard Law School, and brilliantly executed in a series of cases over the next two decades by his star pupil, Thurgood Marshall–the man who became Legal Defense Fund’s first Director-Counsel and a Supreme Court Justice.īrown itself was not a single case, but rather a coordinated group of five lawsuits against school districts in Kansas, South Carolina, Delaware, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Board of Education occurred after a hard-fought, multi-year campaign to persuade all nine justices to overturn the “separate but equal” doctrine that their predecessors had endorsed in the Court’s infamous 1896 Plessy v. The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. This landmark ruling gave LDF its most celebrated victory in a long, storied history of fighting for civil rights and marked a defining moment in US history. Board of Education case declared the “separate but equal” doctrine unconstitutional. On May 17, 1954, a decision in the Brown vs.

Effects of brown v board of education