Tribute to Black Judiciary & United States Impact

Authored by the Hon. Stephen Stokes ('91) for the Black Alumni Network Newsletter 

 

The late, great Attorney and Judge, Charles Hamilton Houston famously said, “A lawyer is either a social engineer, or a parasite on society!” Judge Houston was a graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School. Before ascending to the bench, he had worked as a civil rights attorney in his father’s law firm, and in 1929, he became vice-dean of the Howard University Law School. As a strategic legal architect, Houston played a behind-the-scenes role in nearly every civil rights case before the United States Supreme Court between 1930 and the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. He was known as the man who killed Jim Crow, because his brilliant strategy attacked and defeated Jim Crow segregation by highlighting the inequality of the “separate but equal” doctrine from the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, as it pertained to public education.

Judge Houston was a mentor to many civil rights attorneys, many of whom became notable jurists themselves, not the least of whom was the man who, in 1967, would become the first African American Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court – Thurgood Marshall, who had been the lead lawyer in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. Justice Marshall remained on the Supreme Court until his retirement in October 1991.

Other, perhaps less known, but no less significant African American judges coming up behind Justice Marshall included A. Leon Higginbotham, who was an influential judge, legal scholar and professor. He was a leader in the fight for civil rights and authored important studies on the sociology of race. He graduated from Yale University Law school in 1954, and was deeply involved in the civil rights struggle in Philadelphia and became head of the NAACP. President Kennedy named him to the Federal Trade Commission, making him the first African American to sit on the powerful board. In 1963, President Jimmy Carter elevated him to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, becoming its Chief Judge in 1989. He served as an advisor to local, state, and nationally elected leaders, including several presidents. Upon retirement from the federal bench in 1993, he held a distinguished professorship at Harvard. He was a steadfast opponent of racism and discrimination, and authored hundreds of legal opinions. Active to the very end of his life, he died at age 70 in 1998.

Since the United States Supreme Court was established on March 4, 1789, there have been only two African American Supreme Court Associate Justices – Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas, who replaced Justice Marshall upon his retirement. There have been no African American women on the high bench to date. And there easily could have been, and should have been, when one considers the likes of Judge Constance Baker Motley, who was born on September 14, 1921 in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1944, she became the first black woman to be accepted into Columbia Law School. It was here where she met Thurgood Marshall, chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Her career with the NAACP brought her many high profile cases often involving school desegregation. She played a major role in the legal preparation for the Brown v. Board of Education case, and was the first black woman to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court. She was also the lead counsel in the case to allow James Meredith to gain admission to the University of Mississippi in 1962. Besides fighting for the rights of blacks to get into segregated schools, she also defended protestors arrested during the Freedom Rides sit-ins of the early 1960s. She won nine out of ten cases argued before the Supreme Court between 1961 and 1963. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed her to the United States District Court in 1966 (a year before Justice Marshall was appoint to the SCOTUS), making her the first African American woman to hold a Federal Judgeship.

Judge Constance Baker Motley died of congestive heart failure on September 28, 2005 at the age of 84. Over the course of her long career in law and politics she had received over 70 awards and 8 honorary degrees from universities. It is quite clear that she was more than qualified to serve on the Supreme Court.

Notwithstanding the outstanding pathway to the bench cleared by these outstanding trailblazers, not nearly enough African American lawyers have had an equal chance to serve on the Federal District Courts and Courts of Appeals, and certainly not on the country’s highest Court. There is still much work to do; and during Black History Month 2021, this is a perfect time both to celebrate the successes of the past, and to recommit to honor and replicate our rich history of excellence in service and scholarship.

I practiced law for over 25 years, and besides being a prosecutor and an Army JAG officer, I represented people too poor to hire a lawyer for their defense. And these have included criminal defendants facing serious charges and prison time; people facing the loss of a much needed job; and students facing long-term suspension and removal to alternative schools – what I have sometimes referred to as “alternatives to school.” And as a judge, I strive never to lose sight of the important role judges play in fostering confidence in the minds of our citizenry in the rule of law – in equality and justice for all.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. must have believed the words of Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” And with that faith – just two weeks before his death – Dr. King said he had the “temerity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals for their body, education for their mind, and dignity for their spirit. And that we must be in the vanguard to see that all three take place in America!”

And no less than did Dr. King, Poet Langston Hughes also dreamed of freedom, and he struck a cautiously optimistic tone in his poem, “Dream of Freedom,” 

There’s a dream in the land

With its back against the wall.

By muddled names and strange

Sometimes the dream is called.

There are those who claim

This dream for theirs alone —

A sin for which, we know

They must atone.

Unless shared in common

Like sunlight and like air,

The dream will die for lack

Of substance anywhere.

The dream knows no frontier or tongue,

The dream, no class or race.

The dream cannot be kept secure

In any one locked place.

This dream today embattled,

With its back against the wall —

To save the dream for one,

It must be saved for all. 

As Judge Higginbotham observed long ago, “we have been able to make the success we have because of a tradition of great people giving nothing short of their best to assure a system of economic and social justice for everyone.”

And so, I say to you – Florida State University College of Law, Black Alumni Network – we must knock on the courthouse doors until all of our voices are heard!