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Encyclopedia entry: Legal Defense Fund
- Article from:
- The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the UnitedStates
- Author:
Copyright© The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States 2005, originally published by Oxford University Press 2005. (Hide copyright information)
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Legal Defense Fund
The
National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in 1909 as an organization dedicated to lobbying, political education, and legal action to alter the status of African‐Americans. In its early years the NAACP had a small paid staff that recruited members, published reports and a magazine, and lobbied government officials. The NAACP relied on volunteer attorneys to bring legal challenges to racial
segregation
, the most notable of which was
Buchanan v. Warley
(1917), which struck down residential segregation ordinances (see
Segregation, De Jure
).
In the 1920s the NAACP, aided by a grant from a liberal foundation, began to ...