Point of Hue

Racism hits an unlikely victim

Jack Greenberg, 57, may be the most experienced civil rights lawyer now practicing in the U.S. He was part of the legal team that won Brown vs. Board of Education, the 1954 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools, and that is only one of many groundbreaking lawsuits he has pressed during a 33-year career with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. For the past 21 of those years, he has been the L.D.F.'s respected director-counsel. But now the New York attorney is under fire in two bitter disputes. And partly underlying both is the issue of race. For Jack Greenberg is white.

One battle is centered at Harvard Law School, which has been going through a period of racial stress. Only recently a compromise was reached on a disputed affirmative-action plan for the Harvard Law Review, and the school has been much criticized for its low percentage of minority faculty members (currently two blacks on a full-time faculty of 60). When Harvard Law lost the black who had taught its only course focusing on racial-minority matters, it asked black Lawyer Julius LeVonne Chambers to take over in 1982-83. Chambers asked Greenberg to help. At the same time, the course was rescheduled from its usual slot to an intensive three-week January miniterm. The switch and the choice of a white teacher were "insulting," said Muhammad Kenyatta, head of the 125-member Black Law Students Association. Kenyatta has created a major stir on campus by calling for a boycott of the course by students.

Dean James Vorenberg, an old friend of Greenberg's, argues that in the mini-term's ten-hours-a-week format, the course has the same class time and the same two credits as the original. As for the resistance to Greenberg, the dean says, "It works against, not for, shared goals of racial and social justice." Argues Roger Fisher, a faculty member normally sympathetic to minority activists: "It is a mistaken notion to think one must personally be the victim of a particular problem to be able to teach about that problem. One need not be charged with being insane to teach about the insanity defense."

Greenberg's skin color is not overtly an issue in the other conflict. But it is a factor. In 1957 the N.A.A.C.P. and the L.D.F., after a long affiliation, parted amicably. But now the N.A.A.C.P. is suing to have its initials removed from the L.D.F.'s name. The main reasons: public confusion and competition for contributions. But some insiders concede that the disharmony, which has been building for several years, partly reflects the feelings of younger black lawyers, trained during the activist '60s and early '70s, who resent white leadership in the civil rights movement. For his part, Greenberg declines to be drawn into angry responses to the gibes at his color and its impact on his effectiveness. "Such assertions, to my mind, have no validity," he says with controlled mildness. Of course, he has had 33 years of practice at making precisely that point.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.