The processed records of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund consist of approximately 80,000 items of which about 80% (210,299 images) have been digitized thus far. Spanning the years 1915-1968, with most dating from 1940 to 1960, these records document the work and procedures of the organization as it combated racial discrimination in the nation’s courts, establishing in the process a public interest legal practice that was unprecedented in American jurisprudence. The organization’s records cover a host of topics, including segregation in schools, on buses, and in public facilities; discrimination in housing and property ownership; voting rights; police brutality; racial violence; and countless other infringements of civil rights.

The collection is inextricably linked to the records of its parent organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and a full account of most issues will require researchers to consult both collections. During its first few decades, the NAACP’s legal work was often done on an unpaid and voluntary basis. Later, guided by a board of directors and the recommendations of a 1931 report on legal strategy by Nathan Margold, the NAACP began mapping out an ambitious legal program to seek equal justice, full citizenship rights, and an end to racial segregation. It required a paid staff and solid funding. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., commonly called the “Legal Defense Fund,” the INC Fund, or simply the “Fund,” was created by the NAACP in 1939 to administer tax-exempt donations for the legal program.

Thurgood Marshall was named director of the fund and, concurrently, special counsel to the NAACP. The NAACP and the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) had interlocking boards of directors until 1956 and shared office space until 1952. At that time, the staff included Thurgood Marshall, five attorneys, a research assistant, a field worker, a fund-raiser and secretarial and clerical personnel. When they moved offices, the staff took with them those NAACP files which they had been reviewing, such as those concerning Josephine Baker’s treatment at the Stork Club in New York City and files pertaining to the Detroit riot of 1943. Movement of files between the NAACP and LDF continued for years.

To protect itself and the legal program against charges of stirring up lawsuits, and especially to shield lawyers from disbarment who were associated with its cases, the fund established new procedures for handling litigation. After 1955 it took only cases of indigent African Americans who had been denied a civil or constitutional right solely because of race or color. No longer did the fund work at the behest of branch or national officers of the NAACP.

The fund retained the services of regional lawyers in California, Virginia, Washington, D.C., Louisiana, and Texas typically to handle cases in federal courts. It also paid and supervised local attorneys who conducted litigation in state courts. Records concerning these attorneys are in the Office File.

The largest series in the collection is the Subject File. Any matter not in the form of a legal proceeding is filed as a subject. Thus, "crime," "soldier troubles," and "veteran's complaints" contain many requests for aid along with nonlegal documents concerning specific cases. Similarly, broad areas of civil rights violations are documented under "armed forces," "discrimination," "housing," "labor," "schools," "transportation" and "voter registration."

The second-largest series in the collection is the Legal Case File. More than 450 cases are represented in the Legal Case File, with education cases comprising the largest category. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) is the fund’s landmark case, and yet files for Brown are not included in this series. They are preserved among the records of the NAACP along with those of other important education cases decided by the Supreme Court including State of Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma (1948), Painter v. Sweatt (1950), and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950). However, records related to the Brown case can be found in other series in this collection.

Housing and property cases in the Legal Case File series include documents from the NAACP’s first case on this issue: Buchannan v. Warley (1917). Public accommodations, transportation, and recreation cases date from the 1950s to the 1960s. Cases concerning elections and voting rights are mostly from the 1940s and 1950s with one large case, Gray v. Main, from 1966. The landmark white primary case of Smith v. Allwright (1944) is in the NAACP records.  Labor cases span the 1930s to the 1950s, however much of the related material is in the Subject File series, including material on the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. Cases concerning the armed forces were litigated primarily in the 1940s and 1950s, including the Korean War cases reviewed by Thurgood Marshall while investigating combat conditions and court martial proceedings in Korea. Civil rights protest demonstration cases were litigated primarily in the early- to mid-1960s.

A finding aid (PDF and HTML) to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Records is available online with links to digital content on this site.

The collection is arranged in five series:

Office File, 1939-1968
Administrative records, financial data, case dockets, conference agenda and reports, personnel records, staff and committee files, and reports of annual and monthly activities. Arranged alphabetically by topic, person, or committee and department title.

Subject File, 1929-1968
Correspondence, memoranda, reports, notes, legal documents, newspaper clippings, printed matter, and miscellaneous material.  Arranged alphabetically by case name.

Legal Case File, 1915-1967
Records of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund litigation, including correspondence, memoranda, briefs, petitions, affidavits, resolutions, orders, judgements, and trial or hearing transcripts.  Arranged alphabetically by case name.
An index of Legal Cases by Category and State appears in the finding aid and is reproduced on this website under Articles and Essays. Also available is a partial card index to the cases, 1956-1964, filed at the beginning of the series. Cases with multiple folders are further organized by general record type: correspondence, background material, legal documents, printed case records, and related case material for records of a lower court, counter actions, and test cases.
A parenthetical note after each case name indicates the type of case (e.g., criminal law, education, housing) and the state in which the litigation took place.

Restricted (Not Digitized)
Correspondence, memoranda, legal documents, and related material removed from the open portion of the collection. Folders are organized and described according to the series and container from which they were removed. Some of this material is being derestricted and will be subsequently scanned and added to this site in the near future.

Oversize, 1950-1968
Maps, charts, posters, and voting and population records.  Organized and described according to the series, box, and folder from which the item was removed.

Digitization of this collection was made possible by the Ford Foundation and in collaboration with the Legal Defense Fund.