Cecil Poole

Cecil Francis Poole was born on the twenty-fifth of July 1914 in Birmingham, Alabama. While he was still a small child, about four years of age, his family left the segregated South for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, seeking schools and a life free of the color line. There his father operated a mortuary, and his mother gave herself to the work of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, planting early in her son a sense of justice and community.

Poole was schooled in the North and excelled. He earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan in 1935 and his law degree there in 1938, then a master of laws from Harvard Law School in 1939. During the Second World War he served as an officer, assigned as a judge advocate to the Tuskegee Airmen, the pioneering group of Black military aviators, joining his talents to a generation that fought abroad while pressing for dignity at home.

In 1961 President John F. Kennedy named him United States Attorney for the Northern District of California, making Poole the first African American to hold that office in the nation's history. He served with distinction until 1970, and famously refused to sign an execution recommendation he believed unjust, standing on conscience against expedience.

President Gerald Ford elevated him to the United States District Court for the Northern District of California in 1976, its first African American judge, and President Jimmy Carter raised him to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 1979, where he served until his death on the twelfth of November 1997. We honor Cecil Poole, a son of Birmingham whose learning, courage, and conscience opened doors that had been shut, and who carried the scales of justice with an unbending hand.