Across the South in the 1970s, a consistent and well-documented pattern had taken hold in cities and counties: local governments provided dramatically inferior public services — paved roads, streetlights, sewage systems, garbage collection — to Black neighborhoods compared to white ones, even when Black residents paid the same in taxes. Civil rights lawyers began arguing that this disparity, the product of decades of segregation and disenfranchisement, constituted a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Norman funded a coordinated network of legal organizations pursuing this theory in the courts. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (Grantee 1957–1986) developed the constitutional framework underlying equalization litigation, and with Norman’s support for its Municipal Equalization Project beginning in 1972, brought suits challenging discriminatory patterns in the provision of local services across several Southern jurisdictions. Grants to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (Grantee 1973–1976) and ACLU Foundation of Georgia (Grantee 1973–1984) added capacity to lawsuits in the South. Mississippi Action for Community Education’s (MACE, Grantee 1975–1981) Municipal Services Equalization Project, based in the Mississippi Delta, provided direct organizing and legal assistance to communities documenting service disparities and demanding that local governments address them. MACE’s organizing produced tangible results: it helped incorporate four Mississippi Delta communities as towns under state law, then provided financial, training, and technical assistance to secure more than $40 million for vitally needed municipal services — including water and wastewater systems, streets, drainage, and public safety infrastructure — creating more than 800 jobs in the process.

Together, these grants helped to establish that municipalities had a constitutional obligation to deliver public services equitably, extending civil rights enforcement from the courthouse into the everyday infrastructure of Black community life.