Charles Ogletree asks the "Brown warriors" to share the history of Brown and what it means to them. Professor Ogletree
asks each of the panelists to discuss how they became involved with public interest and civil rights law, and if this was what they had
envisioned for themselves as a career path during law school.
Jack Greenberg responds that he "thought it was what [he] always wanted to do, but [he] never imagined that there was an
opportunity to do it." At that time, existing organizations for public interest law were small and few, making that line of work an
unrealistic option. He soon met Thurgood Marshall and began work at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, launching his career in public
interest law.
Judge Constance Baker Motley completed Columbia Law School in 1946, and her only information about civil rights came from
a footnote in her constitutional law textbook. However, a friend from law school had secured a job with Thurgood Marshall as law clerk
and asked if she wanted the job. She accepted it, and made history as one of the only female lawyers in the courtroom in America at that time.
Judge Jack Weinstein describes the process of finding his career path in the following way: "Like so many lawyers, we
look for options and we drift around." Living through the Depression, trying to make enough money to feed his family, Judge Weinstein
graduated from law school without any idea about how he would make a living and what his career would be. He was asked to return to
Columbia as a professor, and was eventually brought to the NAACP by Thurgood Marshall.
Judge Louis Pollak graduated from Yale, having the good fortune of securing a clerkship with Supreme Court justice Wiley
Rutledge. He explains, "Interest in this kind of problem was natural for [him]" because he grew up in a New York household with a father
litigating for free speech and social justice cases, especially those concerned with remedying wrongs done to blacks in America. In the
fall of 1949, he went to New York to work with Paul Weiss and Bill Coleman, and he was eventually asked to join Thurgood Marshall’s team
on the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
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