Robert L. Carter

Robert Lee Carter was born on March 11, 1917, in Caryville, Florida, the youngest child of a large family. His father died when Robert was about a year old, and his mother, Annie Martin Carter, supported the household as a laundress. As part of the Great Migration, the family moved north to Newark, New Jersey, while Robert was still an infant, and he came of age in New Jersey during the hard years of the Depression.

A gifted student, Carter earned his bachelor's degree from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1937, his law degree from Howard University in 1940, and a master of laws from Columbia University in 1941, where his thesis on freedom of association would later shape the movement's legal strategy. After wartime service in the Army Air Forces, he joined the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in 1944 and became a trusted lieutenant to Thurgood Marshall.

Carter helped design the legal assault on segregation, contributing the social-science argument that helped win Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. As general counsel of the NAACP from 1956 to 1968, he argued NAACP v. Alabama before the Supreme Court, shielding the association's membership rolls from a hostile state. In all he argued twenty-two cases before the Court and won twenty-one.

In 1972 President Nixon appointed him to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, where he served with distinction, taking senior status in 1986 and sitting until his death on January 3, 2012. His life bent the law itself toward justice. May his name be spoken with honor for as long as freedom is cherished.