Pearl River      Sometimes there are some surprise gifts in this work.  Recently, I got one that I’d like to share while reading The Containment:  Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North, by legal scholar and University of Michigan law professor, Michelle Adams.  Reading the book before talking with Professor Adams on Wade’s World, I was surprised to read about June Shagaloff, who worked for the NAACP under Thurgood Marshall.

Adams introduced Shagaloff early in this excellent, powerful book of roads not taken to achieve racial integration in America.  She quotes Robert L. Carter, then the general counsel for the NAACP, as the organization strategized to bring the fruits of the Brown decision ending “separate but equal” to northern and western cities:

Carter had just the person to fulfil Wilkin’s request.  In his letter seeking his superior’s approval for the northern campaign, he reminded his boss of the organization’s secret weapon.  Carter wrote, “In the event that you agree with me that the National Office should undertake this program and develop it, you have in June Shagaloff a person who has a great deal of experience in this field and she would be a logical person to formulate and direct such a program.”  Called the ”Jonny Appleseed of northern school desegregation” because of her work organizing myriad black communities to fight school segregations, Shagaloff was a community organizer on steroids.

Wow, I couldn’t believe I had never heard of this organizer par excellence!

There’s a lot to say about Adams’ work and the book that has already gotten rave reviews and deserves a wide and serious reading, especially in this time when, under Trump, everything about race seems under attack.  For now, though, let’s celebrate the classic behind-the-scenes key role that Shagaloff played as an organizer.

The Thurgood Marshall Institute is unstinting in praise of her role, reporting that,

Following the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown, and in response to the many requests for assistance sent to LDF from NAACP branches and parents throughout the North and South, Ms. Shagaloff assisted LDF in fact finding, building parent-community support, developing desegregation plans, challenging token desegregation plans, organizing community and parent protests, and preparing for legal action.

As all organizers know, none of this happens out of thin air and spontaneously.  Shagaloff turns out to be the person on the ground in community after community, stirring the drink.

Huge credit goes to both Marshall and Shagaloff for understanding that organizing communities were as important, if not more so, than the legal pleadings and courtroom drama.  Too many, in one area after another, miss this critical link in creating social change and building power.  As the Wikipedia entry states plainly,

In 1950, June Shagaloff joined the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, headed by Thurgood Marshall, who hired her at the end of an undergraduate internship. Marshall, who would later become a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, believed that the success of litigation depended on its impact on families and their willingness to demand desegregation and send their children to desegregated schools. Consequently, he hired Shagaloff, one of two staff members of the department who was not a lawyer, to conduct social research and organize communities around issues of school desegregation.

There’s undoubtedly much more to this story, but it is worth remembering the contribution of June Shagaloff along with Ella Baker, as some of the great organizers of the civil rights movement in different places within this great cause.  Respect! I may have come late to her name, but I hope there’s more people working to tell her story.