Jack Greenberg

Jack Greenberg was a civil rights lawyer and educator; a U.S. Navy veteran of World War II and a graduate of Columbia University Law School in New York City, in 1949, he was the first Caucasian attorney hired to work for the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He would stay on staff until 1984 (after 1961, he was the director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund), when he accepted a professorship at his alma mater, Columbia. During his stint with the NAACP, Greenberg participated in the preparation of many landmark civil rights cases, including (but not limited to) Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. He continued actively involved in civil rights agitation almost up to his death.