GREENBERG, JACK
Jack Greenberg is a CIVIL RIGHTS attorney and professor of law who was on the front lines of the struggle to eliminate RACIAL DISCRIMINATION in U.S. society. He served for 35 years as an assistant counsel and as director-counsel of the NAACP
LEGAL DEFENSE AND EDUCATIONAL FUND (LDF).
Greenberg was born December 22, 1924, in
New York City. His parents, Bertha Rosenberg
and Max Greenberg, were immigrants from
Eastern Europe who stressed the importance of
education for their children. Although they were
not involved in Civil Rights or politics, they
inculcated in their children a deep concern for
disadvantaged people. This early awareness of
the plight of society’s less fortunate ignited
Greenberg’s desire to take up the civil rights
cause.
Greenberg grew up in Brooklyn and the
Bronx, and was educated at public elementary
and high schools before receiving his bachelor of
arts from Columbia University in 1945. He then
entered the U.S.Navy and served in the Pacific as
a deck officer, participating in the invasion of
Iwo Jima. After the war ended, he enrolled at
Columbia Law School and earned his bachelor
of laws in 1948. While in law school Greenberg
enrolled in a seminar called Legal Survey, which
set the direction of his future career. The course
offered students the opportunity to work for
civil liberties and civil rights organizations,
doing legal research and writing memoran-
dums, complaints, and briefs. While taking the
course, Greenberg became acquainted with
THURGOOD MARSHALL, who at the time was the
fund’s director. When an LDF staff attorney
resigned her position, Greenberg was recom-
mended as a replacement. His career in civil
rights, as well as his lasting friendship with Mar-
shall, was launched.
Greenberg began his work at the LDF with
only a vague idea about the types of cases he
would handle. He was quickly plunged into the
ugly reality of racial discrimination. His first
cases required him to travel regularly to the
South to defend African Americans against vari-
ous racially motivated charges.On those trips, he
experienced racial discrimination firsthand. The
African American lawyers with whom he trav-
eled were not allowed to stay at hotels for whites
or eat at restaurants for whites. Greenberg, who
is white, saw for himself the deplorable accom-
modations African Americans were forced to
accept because of legal SEGREGATION.
Greenberg soon realized that the LDF had a
definite plan underlying its apparently random
selection of disparate cases. The fund’s ambi-
tious goal was nothing less than the complete
repudiation of PLESSY V. FERGUSON, 163 U.S.
537, 16 S. Ct. 1138, 41 L. Ed. 256, the infamous
1896 Supreme Court case that established the
SEPARATE-BUT-EQUAL doctrine, which legit-
imized segregation at all levels of society.
During the 1930s and 1940s, NAACP and
LDF lawyers concentrated on desegregating
higher education. Greenberg was involved in
important cases that allowed the INTEGRATION
of professional schools in Maryland, Missouri,
Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, North and South
Carolina, and many other states. The LDF then
set its sights on state-supported undergraduate
schools. The first big case that Greenberg han-
dled on his own involved the integration of the
University of Delaware. The LDF’s assault on
segregated education culminated with the land-
mark 1954 Supreme Court decision in BROWN V.
BOARD OF EDUCATION, 349 U.S. 294, 75 S. Ct.
753, 99 L. Ed. 1083, in which Greenberg was a
major participant.
Greenberg and the LDF argued on behalf of
African Americans in countless cases, with
Greenberg appearing before the U.S. Supreme
Court more than 40 times. The fund launched a
full-scale effort during the 1960s and 1970s to
abolish the death penalty because of its dispro-
portionate effect on blacks. The LDF was ulti-
mately successful, but the victory was
short-lived. By the 1980s, most states that had
used CAPITAL PUNISHMENT before the Supreme
Court outlawed it had reinstated it under new
terms considered constitutionally acceptable.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Greenberg also
won important cases abolishing discrimination
in housing, HEALTH CARE, employment, and
public accommodations.
In 1961, when Marshall was appointed to the
federal judiciary, Greenberg was named director-
counsel of the LDF, a position he held until he
resigned in 1984 to become a professor at Colum-
bia Law School. During his last ten years at the
LDF, he concentrated the group’s energies on pre-
venting the reversal of laws and court rulings that
had finally outlawed discrimination in all forms.
In 1989,Greenberg was named dean of Columbia
College, a post he held until 1993, when he
returned to the faculty of the law school.
Greenberg’s position as one of a small num-
ber of white lawyers involved in the LDF’s strug-
gles against racial discrimination was not a
point of contention until 1982, when he was
asked to co-teach a course in race and legal
issues at Harvard Law School. The Black Law
Students Association picketed the opening of
the course, protesting the use of a white lawyer
to present it. Greenberg led the course as
planned, although some students boycotted. He
encountered similar hostility when he was slated
to teach a similar course at Stanford the follow-
ing year, and so he declined the Stanford posi-
tion. The protests were apparently a reflection of
the feelings of younger black students and
lawyers that whites had no credibility to speak
about the African American struggle for equal-
ity. Greenberg was unfazed by the objections.
Greenberg is a man of many and varied
interests. He has written several books, including
Race Relations and American Law (1959), Judicial
Process and Social Change (1977), and Crusaders
in the Courts: How a Dedicated Band of Lawyers
Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution (1994). He
also has coauthored a cookbook, Dean Cuisine,
or the Liberated Man’s Guide to Fine Cooking
(1990), and studies Mandarin Chinese. He was
married from 1950 to 1969 to Sema Ann Tanzer,
and they have four children. He lives in Manhat-
tan with Deborah M. Cole, whom he married in
1970. They have two children.
Greenberg has received numerous awards
throughout his career, including the Thurgood
Marshall Award from the AMERICAN BAR ASSO-
CIATION in 1996. In recognition of his 50 years
of defending civil and HUMAN RIGHTS, Presi-
