A Lifelong Columbian Tells All

According to Jack Greenberg, Brown v. Board of Education is “the most important case of the 20th century.” And he should know.

The current Columbia Law School professor and former dean of Columbia College served as co-counsel for the landmark 1954 desegregation case at age 27. He then went on to serve as the Director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Legal Defense Fund.

During his long career, Greenberg, CC ’45 and Law ’48, attacked employment discrimination, the death penalty, and coerced confession. He won the right for Martin Luther King to march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.. He said he owes his accomplishments in part to his mother, an immigrant from Romania who saved 50 cents per week at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to send her son to Columbia.

Sitting in his office under a collection of African and Indonesian masks and maps that reflect his many travels, he explained his lifelong university affiliation with characteristic succinctness: “I never decided. When I was born my mother decided that was where I was going to go.”

At Columbia Law School, it was a course led by Walter Gellhorn—nondescriptly named Legal Survey Course so as to avoid the scrutiny that civil liberties evoked in the era of McCarthyism—that introduced Greenberg to public interest law. “I ran up the two flights of stairs to Professor Gellhorn’s office,” wrote Greenberg in his memoir, Crusaders in the Courts, “and signed on.”

Following his graduation, he received a call from his former mentor with an offer to work for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund headed by Thurgood Marshall. Greenberg jumped at the opportunity, although he had at the time only a “vague notion” that he wished to be a civil rights lawyer—a field that was, at the time, in its infancy.

Regarding the critical role he played in the establishment of the controversial school busing programs, Greenberg harbors no misgivings. “It’s what’s at the end of the bus lines that people object to and not the busing itself,” he said, adding that many children rode the bus even before the routes were reorganized to enable
desegregation. “There were regrets as to what the reactions were and people who were opposed used busing as one of the reasons they were opposed. If busing took children out of their own neighborhoods, then they objected to that. But if you had kept the neighborhoods you would have ended up with segregated schools.”

Pressed about the role busing played, according to its critics, in the urban decay of the ’70s and ’80s and the flight of the middle class to the suburbs, Greenberg remained unperturbed. “That was in some places but in other places not,” he said. “In Charlotte, for example, in recent years they tried to dismantle the busing but the community was opposed to it. They wanted to keep the busing. Montclair, N.J., for example, where my grandchildren go to school, everyone goes to school on the bus and they have balanced, integrated schools. Nobody would have it any different.”

Upon his appointment as vice dean of Columbia Law School in 1984, Greenberg lost no time in setting up the Human Rights Internship Program, which allows students to intern at international human rights organizations. Since its establishment, 1,500 students have participated in cases as varied as drafting the South African constitution, documenting human rights abuses in American prisons, and establishing International Criminal Tribunals in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

Greenberg himself oversaw the establishment of the Legal Resource Center—South Africa’s equivalent of the Legal Defense Fund. “It played an important role in the downfall of apartheid and continues to exist,” he said. “I gave seminars here on what a new South African constitution would look like and it had some influence on the new constitution.”

Taken as a whole, the life of Jack Greenberg has all the dramatic elements of a Hollywood movie—which, indeed, it is soon slated to become. His memoir Crusaders in the Courts was optioned by New Line Cinema, which later sold its interests to Universal Studios. Although the project is currently delayed due to a writers’ strike, Gary Ross, director of Seabiscuit, will direct the feature when production resumes.

Asked whether his stint in the Pacific, in which he participated in the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, steeled him for the court battles that were to come, Greenberg nodded. “That’s right,” he said, “I wasn’t afraid of doing a lot of things. You could call it being fearless.”

Kim Rapkins can be reached at news@columbiaspectator.com.