Schroeter, Leonard

Born in 1924 in Chicago to non-religious Jewish parents, Leonard W. Schroeter grew up in Hammond, Indiana, and attended Indiana University from 1942 to 1943. While in the United States Army from July 1945 to January 1946, he wrote for Stars and Stripes and served in Florence in the Allied Area Command. After his army service he attended the University of Chicago’s graduate school in the Division of International Relations, where his studies focused on the Soviet Union. He received his M.A. degree in 1949. From 1948 to 1951 he attended Harvard University Law School, from which he received a J.D. degree. He also taught constitutional history for two years at Northeastern University and directed its Center for International Relations. In June 1951 Schoeter joined the legal staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Legal Defense & Education Fund (NAACP-LDEF), headed by Thurgood Marshall in New York City. The LDEF team prepared the school segregation cases which eventuated in the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954.

At the end of 1952 Schroeter moved to Seattle to become Northwest director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. Along with this position he became active in civil rights and civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, to which he had belonged since 1946. He became a board member of the ACLU of Washington in 1953 and in 1964 became the first national board member from the Pacific Northwest. When the civil rights movement arose in 1963-1964, he became active in the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee (LCDC), a loose federation of groups which represented blacks arrested in civil rights demonstrations in Southern states. In this connection he traveled to Mississippi and other Southern states in 1965.

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