was married to a corporate lawyer and had two young children. Maria was in love with the law, and she spoke in quasi-mystical terms about her father, who had served as a judge in pre-Hitler Austria. Carter, she thought, was cut from the same cloth: Both were great men committed to justice.
Everyone called Carter Bob, even though he was a larger-than-life character. When I arrived he had recently saved the NAACP from what might have been a crippling blow by winning a series of Supreme Court cases. At issue were the NAACP membership lists, which were kept secret so that individuals could join without fear of reprisal or retaliation. The first case was called NAACP v. Alabama. Bob won another Supreme Court decision, NAACP v. Button, repulsing Southern attacks on NAACP attorneys for allegedly concocting lawsuits on behalf of branch members instead of individuals who fitted the organization’s stated mission. Button overturned a state supreme court ruling that subjected local branch attorneys associated with the NAACP to severe sanctions on the grounds that group representation was illegal.
Maria also gave me a thumbnail sketch of the tangled history that resulted in Bob’s becoming NAACP general counsel rather than head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF), which had a large staff of civil rights attorneys. The story went like this: Thurgood Marshall had headed the LDF. Bob had been his longtime chief assistant before Marshall became a U.S. circuit court judge, then the U.S. solicitor general, and finally the first black Supreme Court justice. As Marshall’s assistant, Carter had played a key role in developing the legal strategy that prevailed in the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, and had won a series of Supreme Court cases that were stepping-stones leading up to Brown. Bob was also behind the social-science testimony cited in Brown that segregation caused irreparable harm to a black child’s self-esteem.
Seven years Bob’s junior, Jack Greenberg, who was white, had played a much lesser role in the NAACP’s legal battles and was not nearly as creative. Despite that, Marshall handpicked Greenberg as his successor at the LDF and steered Carter over to the NAACP as its general counsel.
Maria explained the various theories as to why that happened. One involved a personal conflict between the two men. Another had to do with fund-raising. LDF was a tax-exempt organization, and some thought a white person could raise more money from wealthy whites.
“Others thought that Bob would challenge Marshall’s status as ‘Mr. Civil Rights,’” Maria told me. Also, some people theorized that it would help Marshall climb the white judicial ladder if he placed a white rather than a black at the helm of the LDF.
Bob, however, had refused to be sidetracked into an administrative job that would be responsible for internal NAACP matters and leave civil rights litigation to the LDF. Instead he developed an aggressive legal agenda for the NAACP, which involved attacking segregation in the North, where it was not based on Jim Crow legal codes but instead on more subtle, less overt forms of racism. In essence Bob believed that in the long run, the South would slowly adopt the Northern forms of racism, and blacks would still find their children trapped in segregated schools and housing, and limited in their job opportunities. By contrast the LDF effort was almost entirely focused on the South, bringing lawsuits against school boards and other public authorities that openly refused to obey Supreme Court rulings prohibiting segregation.
Under Bob’s careful direction, the NAACP legal office was working on a number of challenges to segregation in Northern public schools, where officials claimed that if any racial segregation existed it was the unintentional result of real estate ownership and housing patterns. Bob was convinced that Northern school administrators intentionally used school-district boundaries to segregate black children, but he thought it was a fool’s errand to argue about geography. To do so, he believed, would push the NAACP into the trap of trying to prove intentional segregation in thousands of heavily segregated school districts. To make that challenge even more difficult, most schools had at least some black children attending with whites.
Bob believed that if he pushed the Brown decision to its logical conclusion, the courts should rule that public school boards could not maintain predominantly black schools and predominantly white schools in the same district because black children would suffer the same type of psychological harm they suffered in Jim Crow schools, which was just as unconstitutional as total