James Nabrit

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 processes, several times even before the Supreme Court of the United States, he represented the interests of African Americans, sitting over against racial segregation in schools and other forms of racial discrimination to fight back.

Life

Family background and early years

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

Early on, he came upon the Father in contact with leaders of the African American civil rights movement, including Thurgood Marshall and William H. Hastie. Since the 1930s, James M. Nabrit represented Jr., the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP ) in some processes to civil rights in court, so in collaboration with Marshall in cases that eventually 1954 landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education of the Supreme Court led to the end of legally sanctioned racial segregation in public schools was ushered in the southern states. In the 1960s, was James M. Nabrit Jr. President of Howard University and deputy for several years the United States Ambassador to the United Nations.

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

Work as a civil rights attorney

In 1959 Nabrit of Thurgood Marshall as an employee of the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the NAACP was recruited, one two years earlier, founded at the instigation of Marshall and directed by this, legally independent and non-profit law firm which represented the civil rights organization in legal matters. His first assignment was to prepare a legal document for a trial before the Supreme Court. It was a court of Louisiana, with the prohibition of fighting had been declared between white and black boxers unlawful and should be repealed on the Revisionsweg, finally confirmed in the last instance.

In the early 1960s Nabrit represented repeatedly African American students who had participated in sit-ins to protest against the fact that they were not served in restaurants and other public facilities. He was involved in the process in the states of Virginia, Arkansas, Louisiana and North Carolina, where it went each to racial segregation in schools. He also repeatedly represented the interests of the accused, which faced the death penalty.

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 was listed as many participants in the march, have taken what routes from them and where they should stay (especially in fields of farms ) served as the strategy of the NAACP to provide the courts evidence that organizers and participants only wanted to exercise their rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States fundamental rights. The plan was finally approved by a federal judge and the march was allowed to take place. Approximately 25,000 people took part. In a similar case Nabrit took in November 1968 at a hearing before the Supreme Court, the interests of the pastor and civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth, the permission was to perform a march in Birmingham, Alabama, refused. In a unanimous judgment ( Shuttlesworth v. Birmingham), the court ruled on 10 March 1969 that this shuttle Worth's fundamental right to freedom of expression had been restricted.

Nabrit was also involved in the preparation of a hearing before the Supreme Court, in which it came to racial segregation in schools in Denver in October 1972. Although there were in Colorado, unlike earlier in the southern states, no legal basis for racial segregation, the civil rights activists, however, argued that the school authorities, the catchment areas of individual schools intentionally so blanks that inevitably follows a segregationist and this leads to poorer education conditions for African Americans. In its judgment in Keyes v. School District No.. 1, Denver, Colorado June 21, 1973, the majority of Supreme Court justices joined in this view. It was the first time that the court had accepted a case for racial segregation in the schools of any state, in which the racist practice was not based on laws.

Nabrit worked from 1959 to 1989 for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. During this time, he represented clients in twelve cases at the hearing before the Supreme Court, with nine cases could be won. Over long years was Nabrit, little noticed by the public, the most important employees of the respective Head of the Funds, an organization that had a central role in the legal fight against the so-called Jim Crow Laws in the South.

Private and death

After the end of his professional career James M. Nabrit lived in Silver Spring, Maryland. His personal interests included photography, scuba diving and the demonstration of 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 on March 22, 2013 at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, at the age of 80 years to lung cancer.