NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Private Practice
After graduating from Howard Law, McDonald accepted a staff attorney position with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. in New York. For the next three years, McDonald canvassed Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia to assist local residents and lawyers with issues involving school desegregation, equal employment, housing, and voting rights. She also worked on some of the first plaintiff employment discrimination cases asserting violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 1967, she served as the lead LDF staff attorney in a successful action against a major company for its discriminatory seniority system, which was the first significant plaintiff victory under Title VII since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act.
In 1969, she joined her then-husband attorney Mark T. McDonald in solo practice in Houston, Texas. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had paved the way for lawsuits based on racial discrimination, and together, the McDonalds built a reputation for pursuing plaintiff discrimination cases against major corporations and unions with significant operations in Texas. The firm’s largest success came in 1976 when the McDonalds won a case against a multinational company and its union on behalf of 400 black workers for $1.2 million in back wages. As Chris Dixie, a union-side lawyer in Houston who often opposed McDonald told The Houston Post in 1978, “She must be the best in the South, if not better.” In fact, she was one of the few African American lawyers who appeared regularly in federal courts in Texas in the early 1970s.
Read more about this topic: Gabrielle Kirk Mc Donald
Famous quotes containing the words legal, defense, education, fund, private and/or practice:
“No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority.”
—Joseph Addison (16721719)
“... most Southerners of my parents era were raised to feel that it wasnt respectable to be rich. We felt that all patriotic Southerners had lost everything in defense of the South, and sufficient time hadnt elapsed for respectable rebuilding of financial security in a war- impoverished region.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 1 (1962)
“The study of tools as well as of books should have a place in the public schools. Tools, machinery, and the implements of the farm should be made familiar to every boy, and suitable industrial education should be furnished for every girl.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (18221893)
“I am advised that there is an unexpended balance of about $45,000 of the fund appropriated for the relief of the sufferers by flood upon the Mississippi River and its tributaries, and I recommend that authority be given to use this fund to meet the most urgent necessities of the poorer people in Oklahoma.”
—Benjamin Harrison (18331901)
“Mens private self-worlds are rather like our geographical worlds seasons, storm, and sun, deserts, oases, mountains and abysses, the endless-seeming plateaus, darkness and light, and always the sowing and the reaping.”
—Faith Baldwin (18931978)
“The practice of politics in the East may be defined by one word: dissimulation.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (18041881)