Defense Fund Keeps Prodding a Nation That Still Has Promises to Keep : Law: Despite a widespread assumption that the civil rights agenda has been completed, the stain of blatant bigotry still marks our neighborhoods, schools and workplaces.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund was born 50 years ago, a time when the American dream was reserved almost exclusively for those with white skin. The Constitution seemed like a collection of empty promises to blacks, who were consigned by legally sanctioned segregation to separate and inferior schools, houses, jobs and public accommodations.

Confronted with American apartheid, in 1940 the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People established the Legal Defense Fund to provide free legal representation to victims of racial injustice. From the beginning, the fund was guided by the principle that the law could be used as a tool to effect positive social change.

Initially, the main task was to establish the unconstitutionality of the “separate but equal” doctrine, the legal basis of segregation since the Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson. In Plessy, the court held that separate facilities for blacks were constitutional as long as they were equal to facilities reserved for whites.

In a protracted legal battle against this evil doctrine, the Legal Defense Fund sought to prove that separate facilities were inherently unequal and therefore violated blacks’ constitutional rights. One didn’t have to be a lawyer to grasp the cruel truth of this argument. As a black child in North Carolina in the 1940s, I attended an underfunded elementary school--with outdoor privies and no library--that was clearly inferior to the school for whites a few miles up the road. To millions of blacks like me, the contradiction between constitutional guarantees of equality and the reality of American segregation was obvious.

A series of successful LDF challenges to segregation culminated in the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional. After that, it was only a matter of time--and a great many defense fund cases--before all forms of state-sponsored separate but equal were outlawed. Three years after Brown, the Legal Defense Fund separated from the NAACP, although we’ve continued to share the commitment of our founding organization to equal rights and equal opportunities.

The decision in Brown encouraged black Americans to believe that their full participation in American life was not a naive dream, and helped spark the civil rights activism of the ‘50s and ‘60s. The Legal Defense Fund played a key role in that historic struggle. Working behind the scenes in courtrooms throughout the South, LDF attorneys represented Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in all of his major campaigns, and defended people of all races who risked their lives to integrate lunch counters, buses and movie theaters. Of equal importance, the fund used the courts to ensure that the civil-rights laws enacted in that era were enforced--a process that continues to this day.

For example, the 1964 Civil Rights Act bars employment discrimination, but thousands of Legal Defense Fund lawsuits have been necessary to prod discriminatory employers to obey the law--and to institute measures like affirmative action to remedy the bigotry of the past. As a result, although employment opportunities for minorities are still far too limited, blacks have more access to jobs that were once denied them--from police work in Southern cities to executive positions in major corporations.

Segregated schools are outlawed, but LDF lawsuits in hundreds of school districts have been necessary to implement and maintain meaningful school desegregation. As a result, black and white children from Little Rock to Denver have benefited from an integrated education that has helped to prepare them for life in a multicultural, multiracial society.

Anyone who remembers the ugly era of state-supported segregation knows how much progress black America has made since the LDF’s founding. Although blacks are participating more fully in all aspects of American life, a variety of daunting challenges still confront those who believe the judicial system can be used to advance minority rights.

Despite a widespread, dangerous public assumption that the civil rights agenda has been completed, blatant bigotry still stains our neighborhoods, schools and workplaces. So today’s Legal Defense Fund still must go to court to protect victims of overt racial discrimination, such as the Southern California blacks whom we currently represent in suits against apartment owners who have denied them housing solely because of their race.

In addition to combatting old-fashioned, undisguised racism, the Legal Defense Fund is fighting other battles that we’d presumed were won some time ago. Today, more children attend racially isolated schools than at any time since the mid-1970s, despite conclusive data showing that school integration improves educational opportunities for minorities. In recent years, we’ve contended with majority-white school boards across the country who’ve tried to dismantle court-ordered desegregation and return to the segregated patterns of the past. In cities like Norfolk, Va., and Austin, Tex., minority students are once again assigned to under-funded schools that have virtually no white students. So the Legal Defense Fund must continue to litigate to preserve the fruits of Brown.

We must also contend with a federal judiciary that is not as sympathetic to civil rights as it used to be. With a series of rulings last year, the Supreme Court severely eroded key legal protections for victims of job bias. Most of the court’s employment rulings would be corrected by the Civil Rights Act of 1990, which is pending in Congress and which we hope the Bush Administration will support.

Yet the Legal Defense Fund and its allies are not only striving to preserve past gains, we are also testing new legal principles that could dramatically accelerate civil-rights progress. In particular, we’ve begun a campaign to extend constitutional protections to the persistently poor--Americans who have not yet benefited from the civil-rights revolution.

Our cities and rural areas are filled with people of all races who lack adequate schools, housing, health care, employment opportunities and hope. They are as disfranchised as black Americans were before the Brown ruling, excluded from the American mainstream.

Instead of Plessy vs. Ferguson, impoverished Americans today face the 1973 decision in San Antonio School District vs. Rodriguez in which the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution doesn’t protect those who are discriminated against because of their economic status.

Largely because of Rodriguez, our courts today don’t recognize the federal constitutional right of all Americans--regardless of economic status--to a minimally adequate education, a decent home, health care and a job. But many state constitutions and federal statutes do contain language that could be construed to guarantee those rights.

Therefore, the Legal Defense Fund has begun to challenge the constitutionality and legality of discrimination on the basis of economic status. If discrimination against the poor is outlawed, affirmative steps by government to address various forms of economic injustice could be constitutionally mandated. Our eventual aim is to ensure that the federal Constitution adequately protects the destitute and the dispossessed--guaranteeing them a legal right to decent housing, adequate schools and other essentials.

Obviously, developing such constitutional protections will be difficult and time-consuming--the Brown ruling was decades in the making. And court rulings alone won’t address the economic and social disfranchisement of America’s poor. A broad public commitment to solving these problems is also essential. But one of the glories of America is an evolving Constitution that has reached out to bring more and more citizens under its protective cloak. In the 1990s and beyond, the Legal Defense Fund’s mission will be to ensure that this evolution continues, until all Americans--regardless of race, ethnic background, gender or economic plight--have an equal chance to enjoy what this country has to offer.