Robert Lee Carter was an American
civil rights activist and a
United States District Judge died from complications from a stroke he was 94..
(March 11, 1917 – January 3, 2012)
Personal history and early life
Carter was born on March 11, 1917, in
Caryville,
Florida.
[1] While an infant, his mother moved north to
Newark, New Jersey and later
East Orange, where he was raised and attended
Barringer High School in Newark and then graduated at age 16 from
East Orange High School after having skipped two grades.
[2] He earned his
undergraduate degree in
political science from
Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) and his
law degree from
Howard University School of Law in 1940, both on scholarship. Carter earned his
LLM from
Columbia Law School
in 1941, after writing an influential master's thesis that would later
define the NAACP's legal strategy on the right to freedom of association
under the
First Amendment to the
United States Constitution. He then joined the
United States Army Air Corps a few months before the United States entered
World War II.
[1]
Career as a leading civil rights advocate
In 1944, upon completion of his wartime service in the
United States Army Air Corps, Carter went to work at the
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and in 1948 became a legal assistant to
Thurgood Marshall.
[1] In 1945, he became an assistant special counsel at the LDF. Carter was a lead attorney on
Sweatt v. Painter[1] and presented part of the oral argument to the Supreme Court in
Brown v. Board of Education. He also worked on many important civil rights cases, including
Sipuel v. Board of Regents of Univ. of Okla..
In 1956, Carter succeeded
Thurgood Marshall as the
general counsel of the
NAACP. Over the course of his tenure, Carter argued or co-argued and won twenty-one of twenty-two cases in the
United States Supreme Court.
Among the most important cases Carter worked on after Brown was
NAACP v. Alabama
(1958), in which the Supreme Court held that the NAACP could not be
required to make its membership lists public. This removed a tool of
intimidation employed by some southern states after Brown was decided,
and put into practice the insights into the
First Amendment that Carter had gleaned when still a student at
Columbia Law School.
In 1968, Carter resigned from the NAACP, along with his entire legal
staff, in protest of the firing of NAACP employee Lewis Steele for a
critical article he published in
The New York Times Magazine.
In his autobiography, Carter writes that the NAACP board's decision to
fire Steele over the article was aimed at him, as "an effort to exert
control over the general counsel's office and bring [Carter] in line."
In recognition of his civil rights achievements,
Fordham University School of Law gave Carter an honorary juris doctor degree in November 2004.
In 2004, he was awarded the
NAACP's
Spingarn Medal.
[3]
Judicial career
On June 15, 1972, Carter was nominated by President
Richard M. Nixon to a seat on the
United States District Court for the Southern District of New York vacated by
Thomas F. Croake.
[1] Carter was confirmed by the
United States Senate on July 21, 1972, and received his commission on July 25, 1972. He assumed
senior status on December 31, 1986, serving in that capacity until his death.
Activism and civic leadership
Carter was a co-founder of the
National Conference of Black Lawyers
(NCBL). He has served as a member of innumerable committees of the bar
and the court, and has been associated with a very wide array of
educational institutions, organizations, and foundations. He has written
extensively about discrimination in the United States, particularly
school segregation, and of his longtime friends and colleagues,
Thurgood Marshall and
Charles Hamilton Houston.
Carter was a member of
Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.
[4]
He died of complications of a stroke in 2012.
[1]
Literary contributions
In addition to writing numerous law review articles and essays on
civil rights, Judge Carter published a well-received memoir of his
struggles as a civil rights advocate.
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