Robert L. Carter

Robert Lee Carter (March 11, 1917 – January 3, 2012) was an American lawyer, civil rights activist and a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Carter graduated at age 16 from East Orange High School after having skipped two grades.

Carter earned an Artium Baccalaureus degree in political science from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1937 and his Bachelor of Laws from Howard University School of Law in 1940, 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. Sweatt v. Painter (1950) Later, he argued on behalf of Oliver Brown, the plaintiff in one of the five school desegregation cases consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education upon reaching the U.S. Supreme Court. Carter advocated bringing in psychological research by Kenneth and Mamie Clark on the deleterious effects that segregated schools had upon minority students' learning and development, which the unanimous court later relied upon in overturning Plessy v. Ferguson and deeming public school segregation unconstitutional. He subsequently worked on Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, challenging a Virginia school board's attempt to avoid the desegregation required by Brown.

In 1956, after the separation of LDF from the NAACP, Carter succeeded Thurgood Marshall as the general counsel of the NAACP. Nonetheless, Carter argued and won NAACP v. Button (1963), in which the Supreme Court struck down a Virginia statute restricting public interest litigation. In all, while working for the NAACP and LDF, Carter argued 22 cases before the Supreme Court, winning 21 of them. and a co-founder of the National Conference of Black Lawyers. Carter then worked at Columbia University's Urban Center, and joined the New York law firm of Poletti, Freidin, Prashker, Feldman & Gartner. In 2004, the NAACP awarded Carter its Spingarn Medal. In November of the same year, Fordham University School of Law awarded Carter an honorary Doctor of Laws degree recognizing his civil rights achievements. In 2005, Carter published a memoir of his experience as a civil rights advocate, A Matter of Law, with a preface by historian John Hope Franklin. In 2010, Patricia Sullivan interviewed Carter as part of the Civil Rights History project. His papers are at the Library of Congress.

Death

Carter died in a Manhattan hospital on January 3, 2012, of complications of a stroke, and was survived by both sons, a grandchild, and his sister Alma Carter Lawson.