In 1930, the NAACP hired the Harvard-educated lawyer Nathan Ross Margold to study areas in which legalized segregation might be most vulnerable to attack in the courts, and finding discrimination in the financing of public schools to be especially assailable, Margold advised the NAACP to “boldly challenge the constitutional validity” of black schools that were systematically underfunded in direct violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause; for in every case, when states exercised their discretion to spend public funds designated for elementary and high schools,
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