Jack Greenberg

Jack Greenberg, a 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, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 91.

His wife, Deborah Cole Greenberg, confirmed his death. She said he had been treated for Parkinson’s disease for decades.

Mr. Greenberg was the last surviving member 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.

“I was a kid,” Mr. Greenberg said in the interview. “Seven lawyers argued the cases. I was one of them. Now I’m the only one still alive.”

In all, he was involved in more than 40 civil rights cases before the Supreme Court. One was Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, in which the court, ruling in 1969, hastened the integration of schools by declaring that a standard of “all deliberate speed,” established in a second Brown case, had become an excuse for delays in Mississippi and should no longer apply anywhere.

Another case was Griggs v. Duke Power Company, which led to a 1971 decision offering protections against job discrimination on the basis of race.

And in Furman v. Georgia, in 1972, the court effectively placed a moratorium on executions nationwide that would last four years.

Mr. Greenberg helped represent the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963 when Dr. King was jailed in Birmingham, Ala., after leading a march there against segregationist laws. The episode led Dr. King to write his influential “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”

In the 1960s, Mr. Greenberg established a law project to help the poor fight for their rights under federal programs. He campaigned against the death penalty as racially discriminatory. Under his leadership, the fund supported civil rights efforts on behalf of women, Hispanic- and Asian-Americans and gay men and lesbians. And he helped found the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

When Mr. Marshall joined the federal bench in 1961, he named Mr. Greenberg to succeed him as director-counsel of the defense fund, passing over Mr. Carter and other blacks on the staff and incurring their resentment.

Tensions with blacks surfaced soon after Mr. Greenberg took over the fund. The New York Amsterdam News said the appointment could just as well have gone to a black lawyer. Some thought that the day had passed in which a black civil rights organization needed the leadership of whites, no matter how well intended.

Mr. Greenberg played down the friction, telling the journalist Louis Lomax that “civil rights is not a Negro cause; it is a human cause.” Speaking in 2014, he insisted that the transition was smooth.

“There was no controversy,” he said. “Thurgood was no dummy. He spoke to everyone on the board. They all agreed that it was the right decision to make. I would run the place but carry out what I thought were his wishes.”

But in 1974, Mr. Carter, by then a Federal District Court judge, wrote a letter to Mr. Greenberg in which he asserted that the legal defense fund under Mr. Greenberg had tried to limit the participation of black lawyers in an observance of the 20th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

Publicity about the event, Judge Carter wrote, had tended “to give the impression that the strategy, planning and preparation that went into Brown” had been “culled from the brains of white lawyers.” Mr. Greenberg, he wrote, had played “at best a secondary role” in Brown.

In response, Mr. Greenberg called the letter “an unfortunate mischaracterization.” Judge Carter died in 2012.

Roy Wilkins, who led the N.A.A.C.P. in 1974 and who was regarded as a voice of moderation, also complained that Mr. Greenberg and the Legal Defense Fund had tried to take all the credit for the 1954 case. The fund was founded in 1939 as the legal arm of the N.A.A.C.P. but separated from its parent group in 1957.

The groups’ uneasy relationship was further strained later in the ’70s when delegates to an N.A.A.C.P. convention resolved to withdraw permission to the defense fund to use the initials in its name. Mr. Greenberg refused to alter the name.

A painful episode for Mr. Greenberg came in 1982, at Harvard Law School, when the Harvard Black Law Students Association and others objected to his teaching a civil rights course jointly, on a visiting basis, with Julius L. Chambers, a black lawyer and educator. The group called on students to boycott the course, which had previously been taught by Derrick Bell. Mr. Chambers and Mr. Greenberg taught the course anyway, and many prominent blacks came to Mr. Greenberg’s defense.

“The objection that Mr. Greenberg is white is nothing more than blatant racism,” Bayard Rustin, chairman of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, a civil rights group, wrote in a letter to The Times. But Mr. Bell, who supported the boycott, later wrote that “black students boycotted the course not because Greenberg was white, as some media pundits charged, but because students felt the visiting post should go to someone who could be considered for a permanent position.”

Mr. Greenberg’s friction with Jewish groups centered on his support for affirmative action. Leaders of the Anti-Defamation League thought he had gone too far in embracing the policy as a remedy for racial discrimination in the job market. They saw it as discrimination against whites and saw it leading to racial quotas.

When Mr. Greenberg left the legal defense fund in 1984, its staff had grown to 25 lawyers from its original handful, and its annual budget had more than tripled, to $1.9 million ($4.4 million in today’s dollars).

That same year he drafted a landmark New York City law (Local Law 63) that denies tax exemptions to men’s clubs and other private clubs that discriminate on the basis of gender or race. The Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality in 1988.

In 1989 Mr. Greenberg was named dean of Columbia College in New York, where he had been an undergraduate. He stepped down in 1993 in a university shake-up. He had been an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School from 1970 to 1984 and, after leaving the dean’s office, remained a professor there until retiring last year.

At Columbia he became particularly engaged with the plight of the Roma, a traditionally nomadic ethnic group often reviled in Europe, concluding in a 2010 report that they continued to be segregated from other students in the schools.

“No European or national judicial or administrative organ has ordered the cessation of segregation in any school,” he wrote, “nor have they addressed the principal means of evasion, white flight.”

Jack Greenberg was born on Dec. 22, 1924, the son of Max Greenberg, who was born in Poland and became a certified public accountant without finishing college, and the former Bertha Rosenberg, who was born in Romania. The family lived in Brooklyn and the Bronx while Jack was growing up and, he wrote, instilled in him “an abiding concern for those who are disadvantaged.”

In his 1994 book, “Crusaders in the Courts: How a Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution,” Mr. Greenberg recounted joining other children in throwing rocks at a Chinese man and forever feeling shame for what he had done.

Mr. Greenberg served in the Pacific with the Navy during World War II and went ashore in a landing ship tank in the invasion of Iwo Jima. In the Navy, he wrote, it upset him that all the officers were white and all the stewards who served them were black.

He received a bachelor’s degree from Columbia and a law degree from Columbia Law School, where a professor, Walter Gellhorn, recommended him to Mr. Marshall.

Mr. Greenberg’s marriage to Sema Ann Tanzer ended in divorce in 1970. She died in 2013. He married Deborah Cole in 1970.

Besides his wife, who is the founding director of the Columbia Law School’s AIDS Law Clinic, he is survived by three children from his first marriage, David, Sara and Ezra Greenberg (a fourth child, Josiah, died in 2011); his wife’s two children, Suzanne Greenberg and William Cole, whom Mr. Greenberg adopted; and five grandchildren.

Mr. Greenberg was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2001 by President Bill Clinton.

He remained committed to the idea of an integrated society while acknowledging that full equality had not yet been achieved — “that in many ways the lives of blacks are not as good as that of whites,” as he wrote in a 2005 memoir of the Brown case. But that case, he said, should always give Americans reason to take heart.

“Brown continues to stand for Americans’ determination to live up to the ideals of their Constitution,” he wrote, “and for the proposition that our Supreme Court can be a catalyst for fundamental change.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Greenberg_(lawyer%29