Charles L Black

 "If a whole race of people finds itself confined within a system which is set up and continued for the very purpose of keeping it in an inferior station, and if the question is then solemnly propounded whether such a race is being treated 'equally,' I think we ought to exercise one of the sovereign prerogatives of philosophers — that of laughter."

Charles Lund Black, Jr. was born September 22, 1915 in Austin, Texas, the son of a prominent attorney. He graduated from high school at age 16 and attended the University of Texas, earning a bachelor's degree in Greek and a master's degree in English. The studied Old and Middle English at Yale before earning an LLB from the Yale Law School in 1943.

Black served as a teacher in the Army Air Corps and worked a year in private practice before joining the faculty of the Columbia University School of Law. While there he worked with Thurgood Marshall writing legal briefs for Brown v Board of Education and did other civil rights work throughout the south. In 1956 he became the first Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale, and in 1986 returned to Columbia as an adjunct professor when his wife, Barbara Aronson Black, was named dean of the law school. He was known as a leading scholar in constitutional law, using a structural analysis of the language and logic of the entire document

"He was my hero. He made so many of the great moral issues of the twentieth century seem clear in retrospect, although they were quite controversial at the time. He had the moral courage to go against his race, his class, his social circle." Akhil Amar, former student and current Yale constitutional law professor

Black's interest in human rights was awakened in 1931 when a performance by jazz great Louis Armstrong at the Driskill Hotel in Austin led him to question the cultural norms of racism and segregation. He was a vehement opponent of capital punishment, and his 1974 book Capital Punishment: The Inevitability of Caprice and Mistake argues against its use. He wrote over twenty books dealing with law, including Law of Admiralty (1957, with Grant Gilmore), widely-used as a practical reference to maintain consistent maritime law around the world, and Impeachment: A Handbook, published in 1974 during the Watergate hearings.

Black had many interests and talents outside the law. He began writing poetry at the age of 40, publishing three books of verse. A musician, he played the trumpet and harmonica, and narrated a segment on Louis Armstrong in Ken Burn's Jazz documentary. In 1971 he began hosting a Louis Armstrong evening at Yale Law School on the anniversary of Armstrong's death, playing 78 RPM records from the 1920's and 30's. He was also a sculptor and painter, and acted in Yale theater productions, including starring as Cicero in Julius Caesar. He died in New York City on May 5, 2001 at the age of 85.

"When you let it be known that you're against racism, you immediately meet the nicest people. The same is true of capital punishment."

Constance Baker Motley

"A lioness who braved great danger to use the laws of this land to fight racial bigotry" ~ DeWayne Wickham

Constance Baker Motley was born September 14, 1921 in New Haven, Conneticut, where her father was the chef at Yale's Skull & Bones Club and her mother was a founding member of the NAACP chapter. At the age of 15 she decided to become a civil rights attorney after being turned away from a whites-only swimming pool. While in high school she was president of the NAACP Youth Council and secretary of the Adult Community Center. Unable to afford college, her community service background led to a job with the National Youth Commission after having spent several months after graduation as a domestic worker.

While speaking at the Dixwell Community House, a local African American center, she came to the attention of local philanthropist Clarence Blakeslee, the primary donor of the center. Impressed by her intelligence and commitment, he offered to pay for her education. Motley first enrolled in Fisk University in Memphis, then transferred to New York University where she earned a bachelor's degree in economics in 1943. She then attended the Columbia University School of Law, graduating in 1946.

With James Meredith

While still in law school, Motley began clerking for Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Her early duties centered on discrimination in the military during and after World War II, and she worked on hundreds of court-martial cases brought to the NAACP. As the LDEF began focusing on education, she worked on Sweatt v. Painter, and wrote the briefs for Brown v. Board of Education.

After the successful Brown decision, she continued to work on school desegregation cases including those of Autherine Lucy, Charlayne Hunter Gault, and James Meredith. In Meredith v. Fair she became the first African American woman to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court. Throughout her twenty-year career with the LDEF she appeared before the Supreme Court ten times, winning nine and having the tenth -- a case involving minority representation on juries -- overturned in her favor twenty years later.

Motley was elected to the New York State Senate in 1964, and a year later was chosen by the New York City Council to fill a one-year vacancy as Manhattan Borough President. President Johnson appointed her U. S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York in 1966. She was the first African American woman on the Federal bench, and became Chief Judge in 1982 and Senior Judge in 1986. President Clinton gave her the Presedential Citizens' Medal in 2001, and she received the NAACP Spingarn Medal in 2003. She died in New York city on September 28, 2005 at the age of 84.

Kenneth Clark

 It is now generally understood that chronic and remediable social injustices corrode and damage the human personality, thereby robbing it of its effectiveness, of its creativity, if not its actual humanity. ~ Kenneth Clark, Dark Ghetto 

Psychologist Kenneth Clark was born on July 14, 1914 in the Panama Canal Zone where his father worked as a passenger agent for the United Fruit Co.  When he was five his mother moved to Harlem so that he and his sister could attend school in the United States. She found work as a seamstress and became an organizer and steward for the International Ladies' Garmentworkers Union.

Dr. Clark attended Howard University and studied psychology "for the promise of getting some systemic undertanding of the complexities of human behavior and human interactions... in the seemingly intractable nature of racism, for example". He received Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Howard, and in 1940 became the first African American to receive a PhD in psychology from Columbia University. He taught at the City College of New York from 1942 until his retirement in 1975, becoming the school's first African American tenured professor in 1960.

Dr. Clark is best known for his research into children's self-esteem, conducted with his wife Mamie Phipps Clark, also a psychologist. Their study, expanding on Mamie's master's thesis at Howard, found that black children preferred white dolls and connected them with more positive traits than they did black dolls. This finding has been repeated over the years, most notably in Kiri Davis's 2006 documentary A Girl Like Me. It was used by Thurgood Marshall in presenting his case in Brown v. Board of Education, with Chief Justice Earl Warren concluding that segregation of children "solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone."

In 1946 the Clarks founded the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem to provide counseling for children and educational support for the community. They also started Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited in 1960 to further educational and job opportunities. This organization, known as HARYOU, worked to reorganize Harlem schools and provided preschool classes and tutoring.

Dr. Clark received the NAACP Spingarn Medal in 1961 and the Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt Foundation Four Freedoms Award in 1985. He died on May 1, 2005 at the age of 90 in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Read his New York Times obituary here.