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Death ends a life, but not a relationship. Watch as Hadiya Pendleton’s friends describe their relationship with the slain Chicago teen.
Hadiya had participated as a drum majorette, in the second inauguration of President Obama before being senselessly gunned down a mile from the Obamas’ Chicago home.
First lady Michelle Obama attended the funeral today 2/9/2013.
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The lawyers for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. From left, Louis L. Redding, Robert L. Carter, Oliver W. Hill, Thurgood Marshall and Spottswood W. Robinson III.
Robert L. Carter, leading strategist and persuasive voice in the legal assault on racial segregation in 20th-century America died Tuesday morning in Manhattan. The former federal judge in New York was 94.
The cause was complications of a stroke, said his son John W. Carter, a justice of the New York Supreme Court in the Bronx.
Judge Carter presided over the merger of professional basketball leagues in the 1970s and was instrumental in opening the New York City police force to more minority applicants.
Mr. Carter’s greatest impact came in the late 1940s and 1950s as a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. The Legal Defense and Educational Fund was led by Charles Hamilton Houston. Thurgood Marshall succeeded Houston who went on tackle desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces.
Often laboring behind the scenes, Judge Carter had a significant hand in many historic legal challenges to racial discrimination in the postwar years. None was more momentous than the landmark case known as Brown v. Board of Education. Decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Brown abolished legal segregation in the public schools throughout the United States.
Mr. Carter’s well-honed argument that the segregation of public schools was unconstitutional on its face became the Supreme Court’s own conclusion in Brown. The decision swept away half a century of legal precedent that the South had used to justify its “separate but equal” doctrine decided in its’ 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision.
Underpaid and overworked, Mr. Carter and his Legal Defense Fund colleagues argued before the court that the South’s schools rarely offered anything like equal opportunities to black children. Segregation itself, they contended, was so damaging to black children that it should be abolished, on the ground that it was contrary to the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal rights to all citizens.
Mr. Carter spent years doing research in law and history to construct that legal theory before it reached the Supreme Court. Though aspects of segregation law had been struck down before World War II, Mr. Carter’s task was still daunting. His challenge was to persuade the Supreme Court to overturn, finally, a looming obstacle to equal rights, the court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. That ruling upheld a Louisiana law requiring racial separation on railroad cars. The South used that decision to justify a wide range of discriminatory practices for years to come.
“We have one fundamental contention,” Mr. Carter told the court. “No state has any authority under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities among its citizens.”
Mr. Carter insisted on using the research of the psychologist Kenneth B. Clark to attack segregated schools, a daring courtroom tactic in the eyes of some civil rights lawyers. Experiments by Mr. Clark and his wife, Mamie, showed that black children suffered in their learning and development by being segregated. Mr. Clark’s testimony proved crucial in persuading the court to act, Mr. Carter wrote in a 2004 book, “A Matter of Law: A Memoir of Struggle in the Cause of Equal Rights.”
As chief deputy to the imposing Mr. Marshall, who was to become the first black Supreme Court justice, Mr. Carter labored for years in his shadow. In the privacy of legal conferences, Mr. Carter was seen as the house radical, always urging his colleagues to push legal and constitutional positions to the limits.
Mr. Marshall had encouraged him to play the gadfly: “I was younger and more radical than many of the people Thurgood would have in, I guess. But he’d never let them shut me up.”
Robert Lee Carter was born in Caryville, in the Florida Panhandle, on March 17, 1917, the youngest of nine children. The family moved to New Jersey when he was 6 weeks old, and his father, Robert L. Carter, died when he was a year old. Annie Martin Carter, his mother, took in laundry for white people for 25 years.
Mr. Carter recalled experiencing racial discrimination as a 16-year-old in East Orange, N.J. The high school he attended allowed black students to use its pool only on Fridays, after classes were over. After he read in the newspaper that the State Supreme Court had outlawed such restrictions, he entered the pool with white students and stood up to a teacher’s threat to have him expelled from school. It was his first taste of activism, he said.
Judge Carter attended two predominantly black universities: Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he enrolled at 16, and Howard University School of Law in Washington. Enrolling in Columbia University as a graduate student, he wrote his master’s thesis on the First Amendment. Parts of the thesis was used in preparing for the school segregation cases in the 1950s.
Mr. Carter joined the Army a few months before the United States entered World War II. That experience made a militant of him, he said, starting with the day a white captain welcomed Mr. Carter’s unit of the Army Air Corps at Augusta, Ga. The captain, Mr. Carter states in his memoir, “wanted to inform us right away that he did not believe in educating niggers.”
“He was not going to tolerate our putting on airs or acting uppity,” Mr. Carter said.
In spite of repeated antagonisms, Mr. Carter completed Officer Candidate School and became a second lieutenant. He was the only black officer at Harding Field in Baton Rouge, La., and promptly integrated the officers’ club, arousing new anger. The determined Mr. Carter was soon transferred to a training base in Columbus, Ohio, where he continued to face racial hostility.
After leaving the service in 1944 he was hired as a lawyer at the Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The organization was then the legal arm of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It later became an independent organization. By 1948, he had become Marshall’s chief deputy and soon became active in the school segregation cases. One notable case was Sweatt v. Painter, in which the Supreme Court ruled in 1950 that the University of Texas Law School had acted illegally in denying admission to a black applicant.
Mr. Carter was also involved in housing discrimination cases, the dismantling of all-white political primaries in several Southern states and the ending of de facto school segregation in the North.
Mr. Carter was disappointed when Marshall passed him over and chose a white staff lawyer, Jack Greenberg, to succeed him as director-counsel of the fund in 1961. Considering it as a demotion, Mr. Carter moved to the N.A.A.C.P. as its general counsel. By then the NAACP was a separate entity. Mr. Carter resented what he considered as Mr. Greenberg’s undercutting him.
Mr. Carter resigned in protest from the N.A.A.C.P. in 1968 when its board fired a white staff member, Lewis M. Steel, who had written an article in The New York Times Magazine critical of the Supreme Court. After a year at the Urban Center at Columbia, he joined the New York law firm of Poletti, Freidin, Prashker, Feldman & Gartner. President Richard M. Nixon nominated him to the federal bench for the Southern District of New York in 1972 at the recommendation of Senator Jacob K. Javits, Republican of New York.
On the bench, Judge Carter became known for his strong hand in cases involving professional basketball. He oversaw the merger of the National Basketball Association and the American Basketball Association in the 1970s, the settlement of a class-action antitrust suit against the N.B.A. brought by Oscar Robertson and other players, and a number of high-profile free-agent arbitration disputes involving players like Marvin Webster and Bill Walton.
In 1979, his findings of bias shown against black and Hispanic applicants for police jobs in New York City led to significant changes in police hiring policies and an increase in minority representation on the force.
Mr. Carter, who lived in Manhattan and died in a hospital there, married Gloria Spencer of New York in 1946. She died in 1971. Besides his son John, Judge Carter is survived by another son, David; a sister, Alma Carter Lawson; and a grandson.
Well into advanced age, Mr. Carter retained the fire of a civil rights fighter who believed that much remained to be done in the pursuit of racial equality.
“Black children aren’t getting equal education in the cities,” he said in an interview with The Times in 2004. “The schools that are 100 percent black are still as bad as they were before Brown. Integration seems to be out, at least for this generation.”
“I have hope” he went on to say.
“In the United States, we make progress in two or three steps, then we step back,” he added. “And blacks are more militant now and will not accept second-class citizenship as before.”
If you wish to hear about the Brown decision in his own words, you can view the Febone1960.net Black History Month Calendar video clip which includes Judge Robert L. Carter.
Febone1960.net extends its’ condolences to the family of this legal genius and fellow Howard Law Alum.
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Former Chief Judge Eugene Nolan Hamilton
The family of former D.C. Superior Court Chief Judge Eugene Hamilton has scheduled a public viewing and funeral service.
The public viewing will be held on Sunday, November 27, 2011 at the Hines-Rinaldi Funeral Home. The time for the viewing has been set for 2 PM to 4 PM and 6 PM to 8 PM. Hines-Rinaldi Funeral Home is located at 11800 New Hampshire Avenue, Silver Spring, MD, 20904
Funeral service for family and close friends will be held on Monday, November 28, 2011 at 11:00 AM at The Lutheran Church of St. Andrew. The church is located at 15300 New Hampshire Ave., Silver Spring, MD, 20905.
Judge Hamilton died Nov. 19 at Montgomery General Hospital in Olney, Maryland of a heart attack at the age of 78.
The Memphis born son of a domestic worker and a postal employee rose to become chief judge of the D.C. Superior Court in 1993, making him the second Black American to hold that position. H. Carl Moultrie of whom the court building is named was the first.
During his seven years as chief judge along with his three decades on the bench, Judge Hamilton established a reputation as a strong advocate for children in the Washington Metropolitan area. Both Judge Hamilton and his wife, Virginia became heart loving foster parents for more than 50 foster children. They also adopted four of the children. Some of the foster children were severely handicapped.
After stepping down as chief judge, he remained active as a senior judge. In that capacity, the last major case he heard on November 18, 2011 involved a 10-year-old boy from Prince George’s County abandoned at a Children’s National Medical Center psychiatric ward. The child was ultimately moved to a long-term-care facility near Philadelphia thanks to Judge Hamilton who worked diligently to resolve the matter in the best interest of the child.
Known as someone who remembered his modest origins, Eugene Nolan Hamilton was born Aug. 24, 1933, in Memphis, Tennessee. Judge Hamilton received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1954 and a law degree in 1958, both from the University of Illinois. Before moving to the Washington area in 1961, he served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps and the Judge Advocate General’s Corps.
Prior to receiving an appointment to the in 1970, he worked in the Justice Department’s civil division. After taking the bench, he worked in all of the divisions of the D.C. Superior Court before becoming chief judge.
During his tenure as chief judge, the D.C. Superior Court began a pilot program for juvenile nonviolent offenders, called Urban Services Corps. The program combined a boot camp-like training program with months of supervision and job training.
In 2000, Judge Hamilton stepped down as chief judge a year before the end of his second term and after 30 years on the bench.
“I always set my mark for 30 years,” he said in an interview with The Post at the time.
In addition to his continuation on the bench in a senior status, Judge Hamilton taught as an adjunct law professor at Harvard and American University. At the time of his death, Judge Hamilton was teaching a Trial Advocacy Workshop at Harvard Law School.
Judge Eugene Nolan Hamilton was a man amongst men and a man of integrity. May he rest in peace.
Febone1960.net offers condolences to his survivors which includes his wife of 55 years, Virginia David Hamilton of Brookeville; nine children, Alexandra Evans of Ashton; Steven Hamilton of Santa Clara, Calif.; James Hamilton of Bowie; Eric Hamilton and David Hamilton, both of Tampa; Rachael Hamilton of Columbia; Jeremiah Hamilton of Silver Spring; Michael Hamilton of Brookeville; and Marcus Hamilton of Wheaton; 15 grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.
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Former Chief Judge Eugene Nolan Hamilton
Former D.C. Superior Court Chief Judge Eugene Nolan Hamilton was the kind of man that the High Court mandates in a Supreme Court Justice. Eugene Nolan Hamilton was a man of integrity; a man beyond reproach.
Unfortunately for the people of the United States he was never considered. What a fine Justice we would have had in him.
The Memphis born son of a domestic worker and a postal employee rose to become chief judge of the D.C. Superior Court in 1993, making him the second Black American to hold that position. H. Carl Moultrie of whom the court building is named was the first.
During his seven years as chief judge along with his three decades on the bench, Judge Hamilton established a reputation as a strong advocate for children in the Washington Metropolitan area. Both Judge Hamilton and his wife, Virginia became heart loving foster parents for more than 50 foster children. They also adopted four of the children. Some of the foster children were severely handicapped.
After stepping down as chief judge, he remained active as a senior judge. In that capacity, the last major case he heard on November 18, 2011 involved a 10-year-old boy from Prince George’s County abandoned at a Children’s National Medical Center psychiatric ward. The child was ultimately moved to a long-term-care facility near Philadelphia thanks to Judge Hamilton who worked diligently to resolve the matter in the best interest of the child.
Known as someone who remembered his modest origins, Eugene Nolan Hamilton was born Aug. 24, 1933, in Memphis, Tennessee. Judge Hamilton received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1954 and a law degree in 1958, both from the University of Illinois. Before moving to the Washington area in 1961, he served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps and the Judge Advocate General’s Corps.
Prior to receiving an appointment to the D.C. Superior Court in 1970, he worked in the Justice Department’s civil division. After taking the bench, he worked in all of the divisions of the D.C. Superior Court before becoming chief judge.
During his tenure as chief judge, the D.C. Superior Court began a pilot program for juvenile nonviolent offenders, called Urban Services Corps. The program combined a boot camp-like training program with months of supervision and job training.
In 2000, Judge Hamilton stepped down as chief judge a year before the end of his second term and after 30 years on the bench.
“I always set my mark for 30 years,” he said in an interview with The Post at the time.
In addition to his continuation on the bench in a senior status, Judge Hamilton taught as an adjunct law professor at Harvard and American University. At the time of his death, Judge Hamilton was teaching a Trial Advocacy Workshop at Harvard Law School.
According to his secretary Karen Stephenson, Judge Hamilton died Nov. 19 at Montgomery General Hospital in Olney of a heart attack at the age of 78.
Survivors include his wife of 55 years, Virginia David Hamilton of Brookeville; nine children, Alexandra Evans of Ashton; Steven Hamilton of Santa Clara, Calif.; James Hamilton of Bowie; Eric Hamilton and David Hamilton, both of Tampa; Rachael Hamilton of Columbia; Jeremiah Hamilton of Silver Spring; Michael Hamilton of Brookeville; and Marcus Hamilton of Wheaton; 15 grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.
No, he was not a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, but he should have been, because Eugene Nolan Hamilton was a man of integrity.
Febone1960.net offers condolences to the Eugene Hamilton family. Judge Hamilton was a special man in a troubled world. At no time did he waver. Judge Hamilton stood tall for justice for all. Shall he rest in peace.
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Heavy D & Erykah Badu
I met Heavy D in the mid 90s at Uptown Records through Shyheim. The three of us chatted briefly. I was impressed that this polite young man was so professional and smart. At that time he was head of Uptown Records.
I did not have the chance to meet him again, but I saw him on film. First was in the film Cider House Rules. I was blown away by both he and Erykah Badu’s performance. Heavy D appeared on a number of television shows and films throughout the years. His acting improved each and every time.
Now they tell me he has transitioned at the young age of 44. Too young too talented to be gone.
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