Judge Robert Carter Passes Away

1917-2012

Robert L. Carter, a former federal judge in New York who, as a lawyer, was a leading strategist and a persuasive voice in the legal assault on racial segregation in 20th-century America, died on Tuesday morning in Manhattan. He was 94.  Often toiling behind the scenes, Mr. Carter had a significant hand in many historic legal challenges to racial discrimination in the postwar years. None was more momentous than Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case that led in 1954 to a Supreme Court decision abolishing legal segregation in the public schools. Robert Lee Carter was born in Caryville, in the Florida Panhandle, on March 17, 1917, the youngest of nine children. His family moved to New Jersey when he was 6 weeks old, and his father, Robert L. Carter, died when he was a year old. His mother, Annie Martin Carter, 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.
He attended two predominantly black universities: Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he enrolled at 16, and Howard University School of Law in Washington. He then went to Columbia University as a graduate student and wrote his master’s thesis on the First Amendment. He used parts of the thesis in preparing for the school segregation cases in the 1950s.