1939
Thurgood Marshall is named special counsel of the NAACP, succeeding Charles Hamilton Houston.
In September, Germany invades Poland, beginning World War II.
1930
1938
Spring
1935
Assisted by his protege Thurgood Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston of the NAACP begins his strategy of challenging segregation in graduate and professional schools. Through these efforts, an organization which will later become the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund begins to take shape.
1931
March
1930
March
Nine black boys are arrested in Scottsboro, Alabama and are charged with raping a white woman on a train. Over the course of three trials, they are found guilty and sentenced to death. The Supreme Court reverses the death sentences in Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45 (1932), on the grounds that the defendants were denied adequate counsel. However, the defendants are retried over the course of over 20 years, and the “Scottsboro Boys” become a cause celebre among Northern liberals as symbols of the South’s backwardness, its racism, and the unfairness of its criminal justice system.
Assisted by his protege Thurgood Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston of the NAACP begins his strategy of challenging segregation in graduate and professional schools. Through these efforts, an organization which will later become the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund begins to take shape.
Spring
After the Daughters of the American Revolution bar Marian Anderson, a black contralto, from singing in Washington, D.C.’s Constitution Hall, Eleanor Roosevelt publicly resigns from the organization. The NAACP obtains permission from the Department of the Interior to have an outdoor concert at the Lincoln Memorial at which Marion Anderson performs. The event becomes a symbol for racial equality. Nevertheless, neither Eleanor nor Franklin Roosevelt publicly speak out against Jim Crow. Civil rights advocates throughout the 1930s fail to achieve anti-lynching legislation, the abolition of the poll tax, and full inclusion of blacks in a variety of New Deal programs.
December
In Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337 (1938), the Supreme Court decides in favor of Lloyd Gaines, a black student who had been refused admission to the University of Missouri Law School. The Court holds that the state must furnish Gaines “within its borders facilities for legal education substantially equal to those which the State there offered for the persons of the white race, whether or not other Negroes sought the same opportunity.”
Thurgood Marshall is named special counsel of the NAACP, succeeding Charles Hamilton Houston.
In September, Germany invades Poland, beginning World War II.
