Strategist, The

Crisis, The, May/Jun 2004 by Briggs, Jimmie, Crawford, Nicole

ROBERT L. CARTER USED SOCIAL SCIENCE TO BOLSTER HIS ARGUMENT FOR EQUALITY. MANY DOUBTED HIM, BUT IT WORKED.

Twenty-two floors above Pearl Street, Judge Robert L. Carter's office overlooks lower Manhattan from the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse. The 87-year-old federal judge for the Southern District of New York greets a late morning visitor with a weary smile. He's just taken a dose of NyQuil cold medicine without realizing that it would make him immediately drowsy.

"Are you sure this is how it's supposed to work?" Carter asks a bemused reporter. 'Oh well, I can still talk a little while."

The irascible judge is known for not allowing much to hold back his biting observations. For more than 50 years, Carter has stood as one of America's greatest legal minds. He has been a crucial architect of civil rights litigation, most significantly as a member of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund team whose efforts were rewarded with victory before the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. It was Carter who actually met and represented Linda Brown in court against the Topeka (Kan.) Board of Education and fought to include one of the most significant pieces of supporting evidence before the Supreme Court.

"Although he's not the most well-known name on the Brown team to the general public, Robert Carter was an absolute legal genius and one of the most important legal minds of the 20th century," observes former Baltimore mayor, Kurt Schmoke, dean of the Howard University School of Law. "He's one of the true unsung heroes of the Civil Rights Movement."

Sitting at a green conference table in his office, Carter looks more like the professor he once was than a revered member of the New York federal bench. Holding a lone crutch in his right hand, he leans back in a dark olive sofa chair and slowly recounts an extraordinary life journey from extreme poverty in New Jersey, nearly visible across the Hudson River from his office, to successfully arguing more than 20 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Robert Lee Carter, one of nine children, was born on March 11, 1917, in Careyville, Fla. Soon afterward, his family moved to Newark, N.J., where his father died when he was a year old. "I was raised in Newark and East Orange," he recalls. "We lived in a place called Borden Street, which is now one of the worst Black slums in America. At Borden Street, there was no indoor heating, bath or shower."

After his father's death, his mother was forced to go to work as a laundress. "She was bereft," explains Carter, because she had expected to stay at home and raise her children. "Mother had some education, but not the necessary work skills. As a laundress, she supported us until our financial situation improved."

Though he faced segregation growing up, Carter never dealt with racism firsthand until his high school years, when he waged his own mini-civil rights campaign by integrating the school pool, even though he couldn't swim. Carter and his family also had to deal with the deaths of three of his siblings from respiratory disease aside from one who died in childbirth. "I thought we all were going to die, and fast," he says now. "I knew I had no coordination of skills that would allow me to make money, so the only thing that was going to save me was a college education."

After earning a scholarship and receiving a degree in political science from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, Carter studied law at Howard University School of Law and received a Rosenwald Fellowship to study at Columbia University in the late '30s.

In 1941, Carter was drafted into the Army Air Corps, where he served as a lieutenant, ranking over Whites. That experience led him to the calling of litigating to seek racial equality for Black people.

"I had a very rough time. Subjected to a lot of prejudice and discrimination, I was very disillusioned, mad," says Carter. "Before I went in the Army, I was in the scholarly realm and felt the most important thing in the United States was the preservation of the First Amendment. But all of the nonsense I encountered made me fight racial discrimination."

Black officers were routinely denied rights bestowed upon Whites. Black commanding officers were often disrespected, received less pay and were denied entrance into clubs frequented by their White counterparts.

After Carter waged a fight on behalf of Black officers, William Hastie, who he had met at Howard University School of Law, kept him from receiving a dishonorable discharge from the military. Hastie would become one of the most significant scholars in Carter's life and the one person he describes as the object of "hero-worship."

Leaving the Army in 1944, Hastie enlisted 27-year-old Carter to work with Thurgood Marshall, lead counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. "Marshall at that time was running around trying to launch anti-segregation cases across the country, but he needed somebody who would be able to stop and think, plan strategy. Bill [Hastie] suggested me. Marshall gave me a little office at the NAACP office here in New York and said my job was to expand the limits of the law."