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A.P. Tureaud was born less
than 40 years after the end of slavery and just three years
after the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision in which the
U.S. Supreme Court established the "separate but equal"
doctrine of legalized racial segregation.
Tureaud lived under
Jim Crow laws, the most severe implementation of racial separateness,
and worked to see these laws abolished.
A 1925 graduate of the Howard University
Law School, Tureaud was admitted to the Louisiana Bar in 1927
and admitted to practice before the United States Supreme
Court in 1935.
As the local attorney
for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc., and
intimate of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall,
Tureaud handled practically all the desegregation and other
civil rights cases filed in Louisiana from the early 1940s
through the 1960s.
Among the many civil rights cases, Tureaud
successfully obtained equal pay for Louisiana's black teachers
and the admission of qualified students -- regardless of color
-- to state-supported professional, graduate and undergraduate
schools. He fought to end segregation on city buses in Louisiana,
and he successfully defended one of the first sit-in cases
to go before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Tureaud died
January 22, 1972, after a lengthy battle with cancer.
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