NAACP Legal Defense Fund Chief Retires
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON

ASHINGTON, Jan. 15 — Elaine R. Jones, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., told her staff on Thursday that she planned to step down, leaving the post she had held for 11 years and the organization she had been a part of for 32 years. Her last day with the organization, she said, will be May 1.

Ms. Jones, who has spent her career defending equal rights in education, criminal justice, employment, political representation and voting rights, said she refused to call her move a retirement.

"Retire, to me, means you are dropping out, and I'm not dropping out," said Ms. Jones, 59, the first woman to lead the organization. "These issues are still a part of me, and I'm still going to find ways of impacting them. I'm just going to find ways of doing it that don't have me flying 150,000 miles a year."

As only the fourth person to head the organization since it was established in 1940 under Thurgood Marshall, Ms. Jones took the helm at a time when conservatives were challenging many achievements and objectives of the civil rights movement, sometimes with success before increasingly sympathetic courts.

The shifting environment forced Ms. Jones to rethink the strategy of the organization, which has argued more cases before the Supreme Court than any other private legal group, and to work more behind the scenes, trying, often, to keep cases away from the Supreme Court.

The legal fight to preserve affirmative action, in particular, became an overarching struggle in Ms. Jones's tenure. Employing tactics that were at times controversial, she made it a personal mission to see that only a case that would best support the use of racial preferences came before the justices.

It was the Supreme Court's ruling last June upholding the use of race in admissions policies at the University of Michigan Law School, Ms. Jones said, that finally freed her to make the decision to step down.

"It was clear when I took this job that the Supreme Court was going to look at an affirmative action case," she said. "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. After that I knew I could go."

The legal wrangling to block the advance of other affirmative action cases by the Legal Defense Fund drew criticism from conservatives, most vociferously in an employment discrimination dispute out of Piscataway, N.J., in which a white teacher sued her school board for discrimination after she was laid off instead of a black teacher.

The record of the case in the lower courts lacked crucial elements, Ms. Jones said, including the fact that though the teachers had the same seniority, the black teacher had a master's degree and the white teacher did not. When the Supreme Court announced it would hear the case, after the white teacher had won in the lower courts, Ms. Jones said she was overcome with a mix of anxiety and fierce determination.

Fearing a defeat with sweeping repercussions, she sat bolt upright in bed one night, she said, and declared, "Piscataway cannot be the case." She rallied civil rights groups to force a last-minute settlement in the dispute, and the case was dropped from the court's calendar just weeks before it was to be argued, an outcome that provoked widespread resentment from the case's backers.

In other cases, Ms. Jones had to bend not just the justice system to her will, but the public as well. When the defense fund first took up the cause of Kemba Smith, a young black woman who, because of mandatory minimum sentencing laws, was sent to prison for 24 years for her peripheral association with a drug ring run by her boyfriend, many middle-class blacks, she said, were not attuned to the repercussions of the sentencing laws.

Ms. Jones rented a limousine and took the national presidents of Delta Sigma Theta sorority and the Links, two influential black women's organizations, of which she is a member, to the prison to see Ms. Smith.

"I needed them to see their daughters and nieces, to identify with the issue," she said. "They did, and they did not let that case go." Ms. Smith was pardoned by President Bill Clinton at the end of his term.

Ms. Jones's announcement, to her staff and board of directors, produced widespread shock.

"The staff was genuinely caught off guard," said Theodore M. Shaw, Ms. Jones's associate director-counsel. "People need some time to digest it. It will take some adjustment."

Ms. Jones said her decision to step down was motivated solely by a desire to devote more time to her health and personal life. She said she planned to get a personal trainer and enter a long-distance bicycle race.

May will be the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, and while the Legal Defense Fund, known as L.D.F., may take a moment to pat itself on the back, she said, it must also maintain pressure to preserve the principles of the case.

"It's up to L.D.F. to write the real story of Brown," she said. "Not how we got the decision, but what has happened to it in the years since, how we've gotten into this pickle we're in now. The work is unfinished and that's putting it mildly. We cannot spend the next 50 years like we have spent the past 50."