Commandos into the Ghetto

For years, the brilliant young law yers of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. were the constitutional commandos of the civil rights movement. L.D.F., as it is known, was the legal ramrod in arguing the rights of Negroes -- most notably in the 1954 school desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education. But now that the legal beachheads have been established, the fund, which last week celebrated its 30th anniversary, is in the midst of an identity crisis.

In recent years, the fund has continued applying civil rights precedents in imaginative but relatively undramatic follow-up suits. Many of its younger lawyers would like to leave such cases to others and concentrate more on urban renewal, school decentralization and consumer fraud. "We ought to radicalize," says one. The fund's leaders, who no longer have any connection with the N.A.A.C.P., are committed to the mop-up in civil rights, but they understand the urge to attack ghetto problems. Says Director-Counsel Jack Greenberg: "As overt racial barriers came down, we perceived that racial problems were linked to poverty and that they could only be resolved when poverty problems were also resolved."

In fact, the fund is already scoring some impressive breakthroughs in poverty law and related areas. A three year, $1,000,000 Ford Foundation grant established an L.D.F. subsidiary, the National Office for the Rights of the Indigent (NORI), in 1967. Concluding that capital punishment was almost always imposed on poor, frequently black defendants, NORI was instrumental in achieving the de facto moratorium on executions that has prevailed in the U.S. since June 2, 1967.

NORI also has a suit pending in New York to give consumers the right to bring "class actions" that would allow bilked customers to band together and avoid the prohibitive cost of fighting small claim suits one at a time. Other suits seek to bar urban-renewal projects from destroying ghetto areas without relocating residents and to compel cities to provide adequate lighting, fire protection and sanitation in the ghetto.

For all the activity, some of the fund's lawyers remain restive. "Sure, we're setting precedents in criminal and poverty law," says NORl's supervisor, Michael Melts-ner, 32. "But what gnaws at me is the feeling that we may not be changing things that much." Meltsner, a Yale Law graduate and white, argues that the fund should be "closer to the action. I think we should be representing the militants."

Still, the fund remains one of the most satisfying places for a young lawyer to work. When it was launched in 1939, it had one attorney--Thurgood Marshall. Now it has 25, about half of them black. Though relatively small, the group argued more cases before the Supreme Court in 1968 than any other organization, except for the Justice Department. "Look," says Meltsner, acknowledging the satisfactions, "I'm a member of a group of people who are keeping 37 states with the death penalty from killing men. I sleep well." But there are spells of wakefulness. "So long as that great abomination, the ghetto, still exists out there," he adds, "we're all going to feel a little guilty."

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