As the first Black U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall may be the best-known African American judge. Before his appointment to the high court in 1967 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, Douglass served as Solicitor General and before that on the Second Circuit in the U.S. Court of Appeals. As a lawyer, he won 29 of 32 cases that he argued before the Supreme Court, including the landmark Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. As a Supreme Court Justice, he continued to be a guardian of fairness and equality in the law. Yet Marshall—nor Clarence Thomas, who succeeded him as the second African American Supreme Court Justice in 1991—is not the only Black judge to make his mark on the American system of jurisprudence.
Black judges such as William Hastie, Spottswood Robinson, Constance Baker Motley, A. Leon Higginbotham, Damon Keith and Amalya Lyle Kearse all blazed trails as jurists and presided over some of the most significant cases of the 20th century, even as they confronted racism in their personal and professional lives.
In 1937, Hastie, a Harvard Law School graduate, became the first African American Federal Judge when President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him to the District Court of the Virgin Islands. Prior to becoming a Federal Judge, Hastie taught at Howard University, where one of his students was Thurgood Marshall. Hastie would resign from his Federal Judgeship to become the Dean of the Howard Law School and to later try civil...
INDIANAPOLIS — Marion County Clerk Kate Sweeney Bell announced that county election officials are pushing back against viral social media posts falsely claiming that ballots marked by poll workers...