Robert Carter, civil rights pioneer from N.J. dies at 94
Published: Thursday, January 05, 2012, 9:30 AM Updated: Thursday, January 05, 2012, 11:06 AM
Judge Robert Carter is seen in this 2004 file photo. Carter, who died Tuesday, spent his career as a civil rights attorney and was one of the lead attorneys in the Brown v. Topeka case.More than 50 years ago, Robert L. Carter stood before the U.S. Supreme Court and helped argue the landmark case against racial segregation that forever changed public education.
"My mission was to expand the law against discrimination of blacks as much as possible," he explained in an interview decades later.
Carter, a former federal judge who grew up in New Jersey — and served as a key member of the NAACP legal team led by Thurgood Marshall that worked to end school segregation — died Tuesday in New York from complications of a stroke. He was 94.
Born in Careyville, Fla., Carter was an infant when his family moved to Newark. He recalled the deep-rooted prejudice he faced when his family was forced to moved from their North Ward neighborhood to East Orange after the death of his father.
"They didn’t want me there," he said in a 2004 interview, remembering how East Orange High required students to pass a swimming test. While white students could swim during gym class and after school, black students could use the pool only on Fridays and alternating weekends. And after the black students came out of the pool, it was drained.
"That kind of discrimination has an adverse effect on black kids," said Carter, who would later see the Trenton building housing the New Jersey Department of Education dedicated in his honor.
Carter graduated high school at 16 after skipping two grades, attending Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and Howard University School of Law in Washington, before going on to earn an advanced degree from Columbia University.
Drafted into the Army, he said it was there that he saw "raw, crude discrimination."
He was commissioned a second lieutenant, but said he faced ongoing racial hostility. "I decided I was going to use whatever I had to fight discrimination," Carter said.
In 1944, after leaving the military, the NAACP hired him as chief legal assistant to Marshall, who later became the first African-American on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Their mission was to expand the law against discrimination of blacks as much as possible, he said. Although cases involving college segregation had been won, he told an interviewer that the Supreme Court had yet to strike down the "separate but equal" doctrine.
Their argument that segregated schools could never be equal led to the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, in which the Supreme Court abolished legal segregation in public schools.
The role Carter played was major, said former New Jersey Attorney General Peter Harvey, who was close to the Carter family. He noted that Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., was actually one of five desegregation cases consolidated for argument before the nation’s highest court.
"It is a commonly mistaken fact that Thurgood Marshall argued Brown," said Harvey. "It was Robert Carter who first tried Brown vs. the Board of Education in Topeka. He also argued the case before the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. And he argued it before the Supreme Court."
Marshall, who led the team, argued Briggs v. Elliott — the second of the five cases before the court.
As part of his legal research in preparing for the case, Carter discovered a study that proved the negative psychological effects of segregation on black children, and relied on the research of psychologist Kenneth B. Clark, who used black dolls and white dolls to show that segregation inhibited the ability for black children to learn.
Harvey said he did not view Carter as a civil rights lawyer, but as a constitutional lawyer because he argued much broader issues.
"He argued 22 cases before the Supreme Court and won 21 of them, which is an extraordinary record," said Harvey.
In 1972, Carter was nominated to become a federal judge for the Southern District of New York by President Richard Nixon, overseeing the merger of the National Basketball Association and American Basketball Association in the 1970s.
Attorney Robert Kaplan, who clerked for Carter, said he was always struck by his dignity.
"The magnitude of what he accomplished in life was something he never talked about, but his clerks held him in awe. We held him as a mentor," said Kaplan. "We were very much aware we were working with a living legend."
Carter, whose wife, the former Gloria Spencer, died in 1971, is survived by his son, John W. Carter, a justice of the New York Supreme Court in the Bronx, another son, David; a sister, Alma Carter Lawson; and a grandson.
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