Thoroughgood "Thurgood" Marshall was an American civil rights lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1967 until 1991. He was the Supreme Court's first African-American justice. Prior to his judicial service, he was an attorney who fought for civil rights, leading the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Marshall was a prominent figure in the movement to end racial segregation in American public schools. He won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court, culminating in the Court's landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which rejected the separate but equal doctrine and held segregation in public education to be unconstitutional. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1967. A staunch liberal, he frequently dissented as the Court became increasingly conservative.
Charles Hamilton Houston was an American lawyer. He was the dean of Howard University Law School and NAACP first special counsel. A graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School, Houston played a significant role in dismantling Jim Crow laws, especially attacking segregation in schools and racial housing covenants. He earned the title "The Man Who Killed Jim Crow".
Helen Elizabeth Garrett, commonly known as Elizabeth Garrett or Beth Garrett, was an American professor of law and academic administrator. On July 1, 2015, she became the 13th president of Cornell University—the first woman to serve as president of the university. She died from colon cancer on March 6, 2016, the first Cornell president to die while in office.
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. is an American civil rights organization and law firm based in New York City.
Critical race theory (CRT) is an interdisciplinary academic field focused on the relationships between social conceptions of race and ethnicity, social and political laws, and media. CRT also considers racism to be systemic in various laws and rules, and not based only on individuals' prejudices. The word critical in the name is an academic reference to critical theory rather than criticizing or blaming individuals.
Jack Greenberg was 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, which ended segregation in public schools. In all, he argued 40 civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and won almost all of them.
Derrick Albert Bell Jr. was an American lawyer, legal scholar, and civil rights activist. Bell first worked for the U.S. Justice Department, then the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he supervised over 300 school desegregation cases in Mississippi.
Robert Lee Carter was an American lawyer, civil rights activist and a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Mark Victor Tushnet is an American legal scholar. He specializes in constitutional law and theory, including comparative constitutional law, and is currently the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Tushnet is identified with the critical legal studies movement.
Martha Louise Minow is an American legal scholar and the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University. She served as the 12th Dean of Harvard Law School between 2009 and 2017 and has taught at the Law School since 1981.
Erwin Nathaniel Griswold was an American appellate attorney and legal scholar who argued many cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Griswold served as Solicitor General of the United States (1967–1973) under Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. He also served as the dean of Harvard Law School for 21 years. Several times he was considered for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. During a career that spanned more than six decades, he served as member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and as president of the American Bar Foundation.
Voter Education Project(VEP) raised and distributed foundation funds to civil rights organizations for voter education and registration work in the southern United States from 1962 to 1992. The project was federally endorsed by the Kennedy administration in hopes that the organizations of the ongoing Civil Rights Movement would shift their focus away from demonstrations and more towards the support of voter registration.
James E. "Jimmy" Wilson, was an American farmhand who was convicted of violent robbery by an Alabama court in 1958 and sentenced to death. His case became a cause célèbre due to the small amount stolen ($1.95) and that Wilson, as an African-American, was convicted by an all-white jury.
William & Mary Law School, formally the Marshall-Wythe School of Law, is the law school of the College of William & Mary, a public research university in Williamsburg, Virginia. It is the oldest extant law school in the United States, having been founded in 1779 at the urging of alumnus Thomas Jefferson. As of 2023, it has an enrollment of 606 full-time students seeking a Juris Doctor (J.D.) or a Master of Laws (LL.M.) in the American Legal System, a two or three semester program for lawyers trained outside the United States.
Richard H. Pildes is the Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law at the New York University School of Law and a expert on constitutional law, the Supreme Court, the system of government in the United States, and legal issues concerning the structure of democracy, including election law. His scholarship focuses on public law and legal issues affecting democracy.
Justin Hansford is a Professor of Law at Howard University School of Law and the founder and executive director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center. He was nominated by the United States to serve as a founding member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent (PFPAD). Hansford was previously a democracy project fellow at Harvard University, a visiting professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center, and an associate professor of law at the Saint Louis University School of Law.
Janai Nelson is an American lawyer, who currently serves as the President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF).
Martha S. Jones is an American historian and legal scholar. She is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. She studies the legal and cultural history of the United States, with a particular focus on how Black Americans have shaped the history of American democracy. She has published books on the voting rights of African American women, the debates about women's rights among Black Americans in the early United States, and the development of birthright citizenship in the United States as promoted by African Americans in Baltimore before the Civil War.
Larry S. Gibson is a law professor, lawyer, political organizer, and historian. He currently serves as a professor at the Francis King Carey School of Law in the University of Maryland, Baltimore; where he has been on the faculty for 38 years. Gibson currently serves as council for the firm of Shapiro, Sher, Guinot, and Sandler. He was the principal advocate for the legislation that renamed Maryland's major airport, the Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport and published Young Thurgood: The Making of a Supreme Court Justice in 2012.
Paul J. Zwier is a lawyer, author, and academic. He is a former Professor of Law, Director of the Advocacy Skills Program, and Director of the Program for International Advocacy and Dispute Resolution at Emory University, and has been serving as an Of Counsel at Guttman, Buschner & Brooks (GBB).
