Robert L. Carter

Carter was born on March 11, 1917, in Caryville, Florida.[1] As part of the Great Migration of southern blacks moving north, his mother Annie Martin Carter took him, when was six weeks old, and his siblings, to Newark, New Jersey, where his father, Robert L. Carter Sr., worked. However, his father died within a year. Nonetheless, the family stayed in Newark, and his mother worked as a laundress to support her family, helped by her eldest daughter, who worked as a seamstress until marrying when Carter was 12. Carter spent many hours at the local public library and attended public schools, including Newark's Barringer High School.

The family moved to East Orange, New Jersey during Carter's high school years, where Carter's activism began after he read that a state court had ruled against racially discriminatory practices such as that high school's only allowing black students to use the swimming pool on Fridays, and entered the pool with white students, defying a teacher's threats.[1] The school chose to close down its pool rather than integrate it. Carter graduated at age 16 from East Orange High School after having skipped two grades.[2]

Carter earned an Artium Baccalaureus degree in political science from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and his Bachelor of Laws from Howard University School of Law in 1940, both on scholarship and from predominantly black institutions. Carter earned his Master of Laws 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.[3]

Carter joined the United States Army Air Corps a few months before the United States entered World War II. Experiences such as a white captain's welcoming him to the Augusta, Georgia station by telling him that they did not believe in educating black people, made Carter militant. Nonetheless, Carter completed Officer Candidate School and received a commission as lieutenant. As the only black officer at Harding Field in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Carter integrated the officer's club, to the consternation of many. He then transferred to Columbus, Ohio, but continued to face hostility based on his race.[1]

Carter being awarded honorary degree by Fordham Law School, dean William Treanor. November 2004

In 1944, as Carter's wartime service ended, he began working at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the following year he became an assistant special counsel at the LDF. By 1948 Carter had become a legal assistant to Thurgood Marshall.[1] Carter's first major case as a lead attorney was Sweatt v. Painter, challenging the University of Texas' Law School's refusal to admit a black applicant.[1] Carter also presented part of the oral argument to the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education. He advocated bringing in psychological research by Kenneth B. Clark and his wife Mamie concerning the deleterious effects that segregated schools had upon minority students' learning and development, which the unanimous court later relied upon in overturning the longstanding Plessy v. Ferguson case.[4] Carter also worked on many important civil rights cases throughout the South, including Sipuel v. Board of Regents of Univ. of Okla. and Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board.[5]

In 1956, after the separation of LDF from the NAACP, Carter succeeded Thurgood Marshall as the general counsel of the NAACP.[4] He argued and won NAACP v. Alabama (1958), which overturned Alabama’s attempts to gather NAACP membership lists, and Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960), which stopped Alabama’s racial gerrymandering in Tuskegee, Alabama in the United States Supreme Court.[6] However, he was disappointed in 1961 when Marshall chose Jack Greenberg, a white attorney, as his successor as LDF's President and Director-Counsel over him.[7] Nonetheless, Carter argued and won NAACP v. Button (1963), which concerned Virginia's attempt to prosecute NAACP attorneys for legal ethics violations.[6] Like NAACP v. Alabama, 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.[6] In all, while working for the NAACP and LDF, Carter argued or co-argued and won twenty-one of twenty-two cases in the Supreme Court.

On June 15, 1972, upon the recommendation of United States Senator Jacob Javits, President Richard Nixon nominated Carter to a seat on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York vacated by Judge Thomas Francis Croake.[1] The United States Senate confirmed Carter on July 21, 1972, and he received his commission on July 25, 1972. He assumed senior status on December 31, 1986, and continued serving in that capacity until his death on January 3, 2012.[3]

Carter wrote numerous law review articles and essays on civil rights and about discrimination in the United States, particularly school segregation, and of his longtime friends and colleagues Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston.[10] In 2004, notwithstanding the 1968 power struggle, the NAACP awarded Carter its Spingarn Medal.[11] In November of the same year, Fordham University School of Law awarded Carter an honorary Doctor of Laws (Legum Doctor, (LL.D.)) recognizing his civil rights achievement. In 2005 Judge Carter published a well-received memoir of his struggles both growing up and as a civil rights advocate, A Matter of Law: A Memoir, to which historian John Hope Franklin contributed an introduction.[12] In 2010, Patricia Sullivan interviewed Carter as part of the Civil Rights History project.[13][14]

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.[1] His papers are at the Library of Congress.[15]

• Robert Lee Carter at the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, a public domain publication of the Federal Judicial Center.
• “Eyes on the Prize; Interview with Robert Carter; Interview with Judge Robert Carter,” 1985-11-05, American Archive of Public Broadcasting