The NAACP’s Legal Lion

When 31-year-old Arthur B. Spingarn CC 1897, LAW 1900 joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1911, a white person fighting for racial justice was a rare sight. But Spingarn not only used his experience as a lawyer to advocate as the head of the NAACP’s legal committee, he also went on to serve as president of the organization for more than 25 years.

Spingarn specialized in civil rights cases (often on a pro bono basis), helping to establish the legal precedents that dismantled Jim Crow laws; and as an ally and leader, he encouraged more white citizens to participate in nonviolent protest, building a crucial foundation for the Civil Rights Movement.

As a young Columbian, however, Spingarn was not yet so singly focused. After delivering the “class oration” at his graduation, he went on to attend the newly established Law School; uncertain of his interests, Spingarn began practicing commercial and trust law but found the work unfulfilling. He started his own practice and tried his first civil rights case in 1905, an experience that left him with an initial understanding of the “indecency, inhumanity and injustice” of racism.

Spingarn and his older brother, Joel Spingarn CC 1895, were first drawn into the NAACP in 1910 after learning of an attempted lynching of a Black tenant farmer in Arkansas. The organization was in its early days, having been established in response to race riots in Illinois; Joel wrote to New York Evening Post editor Oswald Garrison Villard, an NAACP co-founder, to see if assistance was needed for the farmer’s defense, while Arthur offered to contribute legal opinions.

Villard convinced Joel to join the organization, and he was elected to its nascent executive committee. Joel then convinced Arthur to become an unpaid legal counselor for various NAACP causes. (Joel himself became president of the NAACP in 1930.)

Spingarn preferred to — but did not always — remain in the background. In his 1962 book Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP, author and activist Langston Hughes noted Spingarn’s involvement during the organization’s efforts to combat residential segregation ordinances in St. Louis and Dallas. In response to the National Council of Social Workers removing Black speakers from its programming in 1914, Spingarn “did not stay cloistered in his law offices, nor was he concerned with court activities alone,” Hughes wrote. Joining Black picketers, Spingarn was in “probably the first interracial picket line in the South.”

Spingarn became the NAACP’s VP in 1911 and chairman of its national legal committee in 1914. He was instrumental in creating a legal arm of the organization that could fight cases of injustice at the national level, in addition to recruiting lawyers to represent Black plaintiffs and coordinating efforts among its different branches. Spingarn’s work came to define the influence of the NAACP through legal battles such as Guinn v. United States (1913), which challenged a provision that disenfranchised Black voters in Oklahoma, and Nixon v. Herndon (1927), which challenged Texas laws excluding Black voters from Democratic primaries.

In 1940, the legal arm was spun off into the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and Spingarn succeeded his brother to become the NAACP’s third president. From the outset, he reaffirmed the organization’s purpose, declaring that it would never waver “from its courageous, militant and intelligent work to obtain for the Negroes of the country their full manhood rights.” He also oversaw tremendous growth in membership, from 18,000 before WWII to 500,000.

Perhaps the most famous NAACP case to occur during his presidency was the 1954 unanimous Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education; no longer would segregated educational facilities be considered equal. Spingarn, ever practical, warned that while this was a victory for democracy, “we must already turn our thoughts to the future and to the work which remains to be done to achieve full freedom for American Negro citizens.”

Although he relegated the majority of his time to the organization, Spingarn maintained a limited private law practice until the late 1960s. He also dedicated time to another passion: his book collection. It was a point of pride that many of his volumes were by Black authors. After collecting for nearly 35 years, Spingarn’s trove was estimated to include 2,700 books and pamphlets — essentially everything published by Black writers since 1900 — as well as 1,000 musical compositions, and more. He emphasized the intellectual contributions of Black Americans in his 1940 commencement speech at Talladega College, an HBCU in Alabama: “Negroes have been writing continually and ably in practically every language and on every conceivable subject.”

He resigned in 1965, marking the first time in more than three decades that the NAACP was not led by a Spingarn brother. He died in December 1971 at 93.

Associate Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall — who argued Brown v. Board of Education — spoke at his funeral. “If it had not been for Arthur Spingarn,” he said, “we would not have an NAACP today.”