Elaine Jones stepping down as chief of NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund

Jet, Feb 9, 2004

Elaine R. Jones, who served as the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund for 11 years, announced recently that she would step down from her post. Her last day will be May 1.

Jones, 59, has been a member of the NAACP for 32 years. She was the first woman to lead the organization in its legal capacity. Jones is also noted as being only the fourth person to head the Fund since it was founded in 1940 under Thurgood Marshall.

Jones has made a career of fighting hot-button political issues such as employment, voting rights and equal rights in education.

She says her decision to leave the NAACP came after the Supreme Court upheld affirmative action at the University of Michigan Law School. "It was clear when I took this job that the Supreme Court was going to look at an affirmative action case," she told the New York Times recently. "We had to make sure it was the right one.

"Michigan was it, and it ended in a slam-dunk victory affirming the principles we have been fighting for," she said. "After that I knew I could go."