New Education Department Building in New Jersey Named for Robert L. Carter, Key Figure in the Brown v. Board of Education Case

The New Jersey Department of Education Building in Trenton has been renamed to honor Judge Robert L. Carter. He is now 89 years old and still serves on the federal bench. Carter was a key lieutenant of Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund during the 1940s and 1950s when the critical legal battles were fought to end racial segregation in higher education and the nation’s public schools.

Robert Carter was born in Florida but was raised in northern New Jersey. After graduating from Barringer High School in Newark, he enrolled at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. He later would earn a law degree at Howard University and a master’s degree in law from Columbia University.

In cases leading up to Brown v. Board of Education, Carter argued 22 cases before the Supreme Court. He won 21 times. Carter argued three of the five preliminary cases in the district courts which were combined to form the Brown case. Young Linda Brown, whose name later became synonymous with the battle to end racial segregation in schools, never met Thurgood Marshall. It was Robert Carter who handled her case in Topeka, Kansas.

Carter was appointed to the federal bench by President Nixon in 1972. He still serves as a senior judge. Over the years he has held adjunct teaching positions at the law schools of Yale, New York University, and the University of Michigan. In 2000 he was named to the Haywood Burns Chair in Civil Rights at the City University of New York School of Law.

Copyright © 2006. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.