James M. Nabrit III

James Madison Nabrit III (born June 11, 1932 in Houston , Texas , † March 22, 2013 in Bethesda , Maryland ) was an American lawyer and civil rights activist . In numerous trials, including several before the United States Supreme Court , he represented the interests of African-Americans who opposed racial segregation in schools and other forms of racial discrimination .

Life

Family background and early years

Nabrit was the only son of James M. Nabrit Jr. , a Georgia- born African-American lawyer, and his wife, Norma Walton. The father practiced from 1930 to 1936 as a lawyer in Houston , Texas , where the son also spent his first years. From 1936, James M. Nabrit Jr. taught. Law studies at Howard University in Washington DC and was able to set up the first nationwide university course on civil rights legislation there in 1937. His son grew up in the US capital , where racial segregation was very strict.

At an early age, through his father, he came into contact with leading figures in the African-American civil rights movement , including Thurgood Marshall and William H. Hastie . Since the 1930s, James M. Nabrit Jr. has represented. the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in some civil rights litigation in court, for example in cooperation with Marshall in cases that finally led to the Brown v. Board of Education of the Supreme Court , which marked the end of legally sanctioned racial segregation in public schools in the southern states . In the 1960s, James M. Nabrit Jr. was. President of Howard University and for several years Deputy Ambassador of the United States to the United Nations .

The son James M. Nabrit III attended Dunbar High School in Washington DC and graduated from the Mount Hermon School for Boys (now Northfield Mount Hermon School). At the boarding school near the village of Gill , Massachusetts , he had white schoolmates for the first time. Nabrit then studied at Bates College in Lewiston , Maine and at Yale Law School , where he graduated in 1952 and 1955, respectively. He then worked for a year and a half for a law firm in Washington DC, interrupted by two years of service in the United States Army , which he served in South Carolina and Georgia, but mainly in Paris .

Acting as a civil rights attorney

In 1959, Nabrit was recruited by Thurgood Marshall to work for the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the NAACP, a legally independent, non-profit law firm founded two years earlier at Marshall's instigation and which represented the civil rights organization on legal issues. His first assignment was to prepare a legal document for a trial in the Supreme Court. A court ruling from Louisiana , with which a ban on fighting between white and black boxers had been declared illegal and which should be overturned on appeal , was finally upheld in the last instance.

In the early 1960s, Nabrit repeatedly represented African American students who had participated in sit-ins to protest the failure to serve them in restaurants and other public places. He was involved in litigation in the states of Virginia , Arkansas , Louisiana and North Carolina , in each of which it was about segregation in schools. He also represented the interests of defendants who faced the death penalty on several occasions .

In March 1965 helped Nabrit Marshall's successor at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Jack Greenberg , the draft plan for the third civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery , the Martin Luther King organized. The detailed plan, which listed the number of participants in the march, which routes they took and where they should stay overnight (especially in fields on farms), served the NAACP's strategy of providing evidence to the courts that organizers and participants only wanted to exercise their fundamental rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution. The plan was eventually approved by a federal judge and the march was allowed to take place. About 25,000 people took part. In a similar case in November 1968, Nabrit represented the interests of pastor and civil rights activist Fred Shuttlesworth , who had been refused permission to march in Birmingham , Alabama , at a hearing before the Supreme Court . In a unanimous judgment ( Shuttlesworth v. Birmingham ), the court ruled on March 10, 1969 that Shuttlesworth's fundamental right to freedom of expression had been restricted.

Nabrit was also involved in preparing a Supreme Court hearing in October 1972 on racial segregation in Denver schools . In Colorado , unlike in the southern states, there was no legal basis for racial segregation, but civil rights activists argued that the school authorities deliberately cut the catchment areas of individual schools in such a way that racial segregation would inevitably result, and this would lead to poorer educational conditions for African Americans. In the judgment of Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver, Colorado June 21, 1973, the majority of the Supreme Court justices agreed with this view. It was the first time the court had accepted a case of racial segregation in a state school where the racist practice was not based on law.

Nabrit worked for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund from 1959 to 1989. During this time he represented clients in a total of twelve cases at the hearing before the Supreme Court, with nine cases being won. For many years, Nabrit, little noticed by the public, was the most important employee of the respective heads of the fund, an organization that played a central role in the legal fight against the so-called Jim Crow Laws in the southern states.

Private and death

After retiring from his career, James M. Nabrit lived in Silver Spring , Maryland . His private interests included photography, diving and performing magic tricks . From 1956 until her death in 2008 he was married to the native Roberta Jacquelyn Harlan. The marriage remained childless.

James M. Nabrit III died of lung cancer on March 22, 2013 at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda , Maryland, at the age of 80 .

literature

• Matt Schudel: "James M. Nabrit III, civil rights lawyer, dies at 80". Washington Post obituary dated March 26, 2013.
• William Yardley: "James M. Nabrit, a Fighter for Civil Rights, Dies at 80". New York Times obituary , March 27, 2013.

Web links

• Interview with Nabrit, published in The Washington Lawyer in 2001

Individual evidence

1. ↑ US Supreme Court. Shuttlesworth v. Birmingham, 394 US 147 (1969). Judgment of the United States Supreme Court dated March 10, 1969 on FindLaw.com. Accessed March 28, 2013.
2. ↑ US Supreme Court. Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver, Colorado (No. 71-507). Summary of the Supreme Court judgment of June 21, 1973 on the Cornell University Law School website. Accessed March 28, 2013.