Damon Keith

Damon Jerome Keith was born on the Fourth of July 1922 in Detroit, Michigan, the youngest child of Perry A. Keith and Annie Louise (Williams) Keith. His parents had come north from Georgia during the Great Migration in the early 1920s, and his father took work at the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge foundry. Though the elder Keith had little formal schooling, he was resolved that his youngest son would earn the college education that had been denied to others in the family.

Keith graduated from Northwestern High School in Detroit, took his bachelor's degree from West Virginia State College in 1943, and served in the segregated United States Army through 1946. He then earned his law degree from Howard University in 1949 and a master of laws from Wayne State University in 1956. Building a practice in Detroit, he helped establish one of the first Black law firms to open offices in the city's long all-white legal district.

Nominated by President Lyndon Johnson, Keith took the federal bench for the Eastern District of Michigan in 1967, rising to chief judge before President Jimmy Carter elevated him to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in 1977. From that bench he struck at segregated schools, housing and employment discrimination, and, in the 1971 case known as the Keith case, unlawful government wiretapping — a ruling the Supreme Court upheld the following year.

Across more than half a century in the law he became a conscience of the federal judiciary, remembered for the warning that "democracies die behind closed doors." Damon Keith died on April 28, 2019, at the age of ninety-six. May his name be spoken with honor, and his stand for justice remembered.