Judge Robert L. Carter
The Hon. Robert L. Carter was born in Careyville, Florida in February 1917, but spent his formative years in New Jersey. He received his LL.B from Howard University in 1940, and his LL.M from Columbia University in 1941. Spending the intervening years in the U.S. Air Force, Carter began working as legal counsel to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1944. With a career that spanned over twenty years, Carter remains most famous for his litigation of Brown v. Board of Education and NAACP v. Alabama. In 1972, President Nixon appointed Carter as a U.S. District Court judge for the Southern District of New York, a position that Carter still holds today. In addition, Carter has remained active on the boards of numerous social service organizations, and continues to publicize the discrimination inherent in America's political and educational institutions.
Civil Rights Era
Carter began his work with the NAACP as an assistant to Thurgood Marshall, often venturing into Southern courtrooms hostile to the presence of black attorneys. In the 1950s, the NAACP's tactics for fighting segregation and discrimination changed, and Carter emerged as one of the leaders behind the new strategy. For the first time, NAACP lawyers confronted the legality of the separate-but-equal doctrine itself, claiming that it was unconsititutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. At the same time, they continued to argue that the creation of separate facilities created inequality; only integration could remedy the situation. Carter used this reasoning in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the first of the five cases known collectively as Brown v. Board of Education.
Bibliography
Information for this biography was gathered from the following sources: