WASHINGTON, DC.- A major portion of the processed records of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund are now available online for the first time from the Library of Congress.

Spanning the years 1915-1968, with most dating from 1940 to 1960, these records document the organization’s work as it combated racial discrimination in the nation’s courts, establishing in the process a public interest legal practice that was unprecedented in American jurisprudence.

About 80% of the approximately 80,000 items have been digitized thus far resulting in approximately 210,300 images in the digital collection. The digitization will greatly expand research access to this significant collection of primary source materials for scholars and students studying the civil rights movement.

The organization’s records cover a host of topics, including segregation in schools, on buses and in public facilities; discrimination in housing and property ownership; voting rights; police brutality; racial violence; and countless other infringements of civil rights.

Digitization of the collection was done in collaboration with the Legal Defense Fund and was made possible with the generous support of the Ford Foundation, which provided core funding for the establishment of the Library’s “For the People: Fund for Powering Knowledge” designed to connect Americans with important social movements and showcase how they shape the fabric of American life and government.

“The Library of Congress is honored to preserve the documentary legacy of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and its fight for racial justice and equality,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. “I am grateful to both Sherrilyn Ifill and her successor Janai Nelson as president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund for supporting our organizations’ shared vision of providing greater access to resources documenting the organization’s transformative work and storied history.”

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., commonly called the Legal Defense Fund, was created by the NAACP in 1939 to administer tax-exempt donations for the legal program. Although the fund has operated as a separate entity since its inception, for many years it shared staff members and a board of directors with the parent organization. The fund severed ties with the NAACP in 1957 but retained its original name.

Highlights of the Legal Defense Fund records include:

• Files pertaining to the Detroit riot of 1943.

• Correspondence pertaining to Josephine Baker’s treatment at the Stork Club in New York City, 1951.

• Letters in 1955 between Thurgood Marshall and Simeon Booker, Washington bureau chief for Jet magazine, concerning witnesses for the Emmett Till trial.

• Correspondence between Thurgood Marshall and his staff concerning a trip to Korea to investigate charges of racism in the U.S. military and the disproportionate number of court martial proceedings brought against Black soldiers, 1951.

• A letter from Langston Hughes to Henry Lee Moon concerning his poem, “The Ballad of Harry Moore,” January 3, 1952.

• Documents about Brown v. Board of Education, 1954, and related cases.

• Cases concerning elections and voting rights in the 1940s and 1950s with one Alabama primary election case, Gray v. Main, from 1966.

In conjunction with this digitization project, the Legal Defense Fund Archives counsel has also reviewed the remaining 55 containers of restricted processed records and has cleared about half of the folders for scanning later this year with their online release anticipated in early 2025.

The Library of Congress Manuscript Division houses the most comprehensive civil rights collection in the country. In addition to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Records, the division also holds the original records of its parent organization, the NAACP, along with those of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, National Urban League, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and Gilbert Jonas Company as well as the personal papers of Edward W. Brooke, Robert L. Carter, Frederick Douglass, James Forman, Patricia Roberts Harris, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Arthur Spingarn, Moorfield Storey, Rosa Parks, Joseph Rauh, Mary Church Terrell, Booker T. Washington, and Roy Wilkins.