NAACP Legal Defense Fund : Defend, Educate, Empower

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"The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund is simply the best civil rights law firm in American history." -- President Obama

News Updates

  • LDF Successfully Defends the Heart of the Voting Rights Act

    5/18/12
    Related Case or Issue: 
    Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder

    (New York, NY)  Today, for the second time in the past year, a federal court in Washington, D.C. upheld the constitutionality of the heart of the 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act.  

  • Remembering Brown v. Board of Education

    5/17/12
    Related Case or Issue: 
    Landmark: Brown v. Board of Education

    Fifty eight years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court issued perhaps the most important decision in its history.  In Brown v.

  • Louis H. Pollak, Civil Rights Advocate and Federal Judge, Dies at 89

    5/16/12
    Source: 
    Louis H. Pollak, Civil Rights Advocate and Federal Judge, Dies at 89

    Louis H. Pollak, a federal judge and former dean of two prestigious law schools who played a significant role in major civil rights cases before the Supreme Court, including the landmark Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case, died on Tuesday at his home in Philadelphia. He was 89.

    The cause was congestive heart failure, his wife, Katherine, said.

  • Judge Louis H. Pollak, 1922 – 2012

    5/12/12
    Source: 
    LDF

    The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. is deeply saddened by the passing of Judge Louis H. Pollak, a legendary figure in LDF’s and this nation’s quest for racial justice and equality. Fighting for equality may have been part of Judge Pollak’s destiny because his father, Walter Pollak, argued the infamous Scottsboro case in the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Pollak’s contributions, however, were truly awe-inspiring. After graduating from Yale Law School in 1948, Louis Pollak clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Wiley Rutledge. It was then that he befriended William T.

  • Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach, 1922 – 2012

    5/12/12
    Source: 
    LDF

    In the early 1960s Nicholas Katzenbach was part of the cadre of talented lawyers from the Justice Department who worked to ensure that the national promise of equality too long ignored was finally kept. In those years, Katzenbach, as Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s deputy and later as Attorney General himself, led the Department’s efforts to eliminate Jim Crow, secure the right to vote; and to open the public schools and other institutions of the Southern U.S. to blacks.