
“Our Division is committed to the principle that minority group citizens must be empowered to work for their own liberation. Our role is to heighten their consciousness of their legal rights and to assist them in developing strategies to make bureaucracies accountable,” Jean Fairfax stated in a 1972 report to funders. The NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund’s (LDF) Division of Legal Information and Community Service was created in 1965 by Fairfax, who served as the Division’s director until her retirement in 1984. Fairfax worked closely with another unsung hero of civil rights, Phyllis McClure, who began working for the Division in 1969 as LDF’s first employee based in Washington, D.C. Upon Fairfax’s departure, McClure ran the department, which transformed into the Division of Policy and Information, until 1994. Working closely with local community leaders and volunteers, partner organizations, government agency officials, academics, and LDF litigators, Fairfax’s team developed and distributed educational materials to countless Black families across the country, led interdisciplinary strategy meetings, created innovative programs to enhance employment opportunities for Black women, authored rigorous and influential research reports, and bolstered LDF’s impact litigation in myriad ways. “The selective and timely use of litigation to achieve broad administrative reform can best be accomplished when the community worker and lawyer function as a team, furnishing coordinated and mutually-strengthening resources,” Fairfax wrote in 1972. Drawn from the fifty boxes of Division records in the LDF Archives, including the files of the Division’s field offices in Charlotte, Memphis, and San Francisco, the materials presented here barely scratch the surface of the Division’s broad efforts and impact. Fairfax, McClure, and their team rarely received public credit for their work, but their influence at the Legal Defense Fund and contributions to improving the lives of Black Americans cannot be overstated.