1.
Supreme Court of the United States
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The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest federal court of the United States. In the legal system of the United States, the Supreme Court is the interpreter of federal constitutional law. The Court normally consists of the Chief Justice of the United States and eight justices who are nominated by the President. Once appointed, justices have life tenure unless they resign, retire, in modern discourse, the justices are often categorized as having conservative, moderate, or liberal philosophies of law and of judicial interpretation. Each justice has one vote, and while many cases are decided unanimously, the Court meets in the United States Supreme Court Building in Washington, D. C. The Supreme Court is sometimes referred to as SCOTUS, in analogy to other acronyms such as POTUS. The ratification of the United States Constitution established the Supreme Court in 1789 and its powers are detailed in Article Three of the Constitution. The Supreme Court is the court specifically established by the Constitution. The Court first convened on February 2,1790, by which five of its six initial positions had been filled. According to historian Fergus Bordewich, in its first session, he Supreme Court convened for the first time at the Royal Exchange Building on Broad Street and they had no cases to consider. After a week of inactivity, they adjourned until September, the sixth member was not confirmed until May 12,1790. Because the full Court had only six members, every decision that it made by a majority was made by two-thirds. However, Congress has always allowed less than the Courts full membership to make decisions, under Chief Justices Jay, Rutledge, and Ellsworth, the Court heard few cases, its first decision was West v. Barnes, a case involving a procedural issue. The Courts power and prestige grew substantially during the Marshall Court, the Marshall Court also ended the practice of each justice issuing his opinion seriatim, a remnant of British tradition, and instead issuing a single majority opinion. Also during Marshalls tenure, although beyond the Courts control, the impeachment, the Taney Court made several important rulings, such as Sheldon v. Nevertheless, it is primarily remembered for its ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which helped precipitate the Civil War. In the Reconstruction era, the Chase, Waite, and Fuller Courts interpreted the new Civil War amendments to the Constitution, during World War II, the Court continued to favor government power, upholding the internment of Japanese citizens and the mandatory pledge of allegiance. Nevertheless, Gobitis was soon repudiated, and the Steel Seizure Case restricted the pro-government trend, the Warren Court dramatically expanded the force of Constitutional civil liberties. It held that segregation in public schools violates equal protection and that traditional legislative district boundaries violated the right to vote
2.
Fred M. Vinson
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Frederick Fred Moore Vinson was an American politician who served the United States in all three branches of government and was the most prominent member of the Vinson political family. In the legislative branch, he was an member of the United States House of Representatives from Louisa, Kentucky. In the executive branch, he was Secretary of the Treasury under President Harry S. Truman, in the judicial branch, President Truman appointed Vinson the 13th Chief Justice of the United States in 1946. To date, he is the last candidate nominated by a president from the Democratic Party to be confirmed as Chief Justice. As a child he would help his father in the jail, Vinson worked odd jobs while in school. He graduated from Kentucky Normal School in 1908 and enrolled at Centre College, while at Centre, he was a member of the Kentucky Alpha Delta chapter of Phi Delta Theta fraternity. He became a lawyer in Louisa, a town of 2,500 residents. He first ran for and was elected to office as the City Attorney of Louisa and he joined the Army during World War I. Following the war, he was elected as the Commonwealths Attorney for the Thirty-Second Judicial District of Kentucky, Vinson married Julia Roberta Dixon on January 24,1924 in Ashland, Kentucky. In 1924, he ran in an election for his districts seat in Congress after William J. Fields resigned to become the governor of Kentucky. Vinson was elected as a Democrat and then was reelected twice before losing in 1928 and his loss was attributed to his refusal to dissociate his campaign from Alfred E. Smiths presidential campaign. When the position of the American Medical Association on the measure was questioned, while he was in Congress he befriended Missouri Senator Harry S. Truman, a friendship that would last throughout his life. He soon became an advisor, confidant, card player. Vinsons Congressional service ended after he was nominated by Franklin D. Roosevelt on November 26,1937, Roosevelt wanted him to fill a seat vacated by Charles H. Robb on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Vinson was confirmed by the United States Senate on December 9,1937, while he was there, he was designated by Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone on March 2,1942, as chief judge of the United States Emergency Court of Appeals. He served here until his resignation on May 27,1943 and he resigned from the bench to become Director of the Office of Economic Stabilization, an executive agency charged with fighting inflation. He also spent time as Federal Loan Administrator and director of War Mobilization and Reconversion and he was appointed United States Secretary of the Treasury by President Truman and served from July 23,1945, to June 23,1946. Before the war ended, Vinson directed the last of the great war-bond drives, in order to encourage private investment in postwar America, he promoted a tax cut in the Revenue Act of 1945
3.
Hugo Black
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Black is widely regarded as one of the most influential Supreme Court justices in the 20th century. During his political career, Black was regarded as a supporter of liberal policies. A reformer in the Senate and a devoted New Dealer, Black endorsed Roosevelt in both the 1932 and 1936 presidential elections, Hugo LaFayette Black was the youngest of the eight children of William Lafayette Black and Martha Toland Black. He was born on February 27,1886, in a wooden farmhouse in Ashland, Alabama. Because his brother Orlando had become a doctor, Hugo decided at first to follow in his footsteps. At age seventeen, he left school and enrolled at Birmingham Medical School, however, it was Orlando who suggested that Hugo should enroll at the University of Alabama School of Law. After graduating in June 1906, he moved back to Ashland and his practice was not successful there, so Black moved to Birmingham in 1907 where he specialized in labor law and personal injury cases. Consequent to his defense of an African American who was forced into a form of slavery after incarceration, Black was befriended by A. O. Lane. When Lane was elected to the Birmingham City Commission in 1911, he asked Black to serve as a court judge. In 1912, Black resigned that seat in order to return to practicing law full-time and he was not done with public service, in 1914, he began a four-year term as the Jefferson County Prosecuting Attorney. Three years later, during World War I, Black resigned in order to join the United States Army and he served in the 81st Field Artillery, but was not assigned to Europe. He joined the Birmingham Civitan Club during this time, eventually serving as president of the group and he remained an active member throughout his life, occasionally contributing articles to Civitan publications. On February 23,1921, he married Josephine Foster, with whom he would have three children, Hugo L. Black, II, an attorney, Sterling Foster, Josephine died in 1951, in 1957, Black married Elizabeth Seay DeMeritte. In 1926, Black sought election to the United States Senate from Alabama, since the Democratic Party dominated Alabama politics at the time, he easily defeated his Republican opponent, E. H. Dryer, winning 80. 9% of the vote. He was reelected in 1932, winning 86. 3% of the vote against Republican J. Theodore Johnson, Senator Black gained a reputation as a tenacious investigator. In 1934, for example, he chaired the committee that looked into the contracts awarded to air mail carriers under Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown, an inquiry which led to the Air Mail scandal. In order to correct what he termed abuses of fraud and collusion resulting from the Air Mail Act of 1930, he introduced the Black-McKellar Bill, the following year he participated in a Senate committees investigation of lobbying practices. In 1935, Black became chairman of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor, in 1937 he sponsored the Black-Connery Bill, which sought to establish a national minimum wage and a maximum workweek of thirty hours
4.
Stanley Forman Reed
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For the Indian newspaper editor and British politician, see Stanley Reed. Stanley Forman Reed was a noted American attorney who served as United States Solicitor General from 1935 to 1938 and he was the last Supreme Court Justice who did not graduate from law school to serve on the Supreme Court. Stanley Reed was born in the town of Minerva in Mason County, Kentucky, on the last day of 1884 to John. His father was a physician and a Protestant who adhered to no particular organized church. The Reeds and Formans traced their history to the earliest colonial period in America, Reed attended Kentucky Wesleyan College and received a B. A. degree in 1902. He then attended Yale University as an undergraduate, and obtained a second B. A. in 1906 and he studied law at the University of Virginia and Columbia University, but did not obtain a law degree. Reed married the former Winifred Elgin in May 1908, the couple had two sons, John A. and Stanley Jr. who both became attorneys. In 1909 he traveled to France and studied at the Sorbonne, after his studies in France, Reed returned to Kentucky. He was admitted to the bar in 1910 and established a practice in Maysville. He was elected to the Kentucky General Assembly in 1912 and served two two-year terms, after the United States entered World War I in April 1917, Reed joined the United States Army and was commissioned a lieutenant. When the war ended in 1918, Reed returned to his law practice. He represented the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway and the Kentucky Burley Tobacco Growers Association, Stanley Reed was very active in the Sons of the American Revolution and Sons of Colonial Wars, while his wife was a national officer in the Daughters of the American Revolution. The Reeds settled on a farm near Maysville, where Stanley Reed raised prize-winning Holstein cattle in his spare time, Reeds work for a number of large agricultural interests in Kentucky made him a nationally known authority on the law of agricultural cooperatives. It was this reputation which brought him to the attention of federal officials, Herbert Hoover had been elected President of the United States in November 1928, and took office in March 1929. But even then, the industry in the United States was heading for a depression. Unlike his predecessor, Hoover agreed to provide some support for agriculture. The act established and was administered by the Federal Farm Board, the crash of the stock market in late October 1929 led the Federal Farm Boards general counsel to resign. Although Reed was a Democrat, his reputation as a corporate agricultural lawyer led President Hoover to appoint him the new general counsel of the Federal Farm Board on November 7,1929, Reed served as general counsel until December 1932
5.
William O. Douglas
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William Orville Douglas was an American jurist and politician who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Nominated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Douglas was confirmed at the age of 40 and his term, lasting 36 years and 209 days, is the longest term in the history of the Supreme Court. Douglas holds a number of records as a Supreme Court Justice and he was the 79th person appointed and confirmed to the bench of that court. In 1975 Time magazine called Douglas the most doctrinaire and committed civil libertarian ever to sit on the court. Douglas was born in 1898 in Maine Township, Otter Tail County, Minnesota, the son of Julia Bickford and William Douglas and his family moved to California, and then to Cleveland, Washington. At age two Douglas suffered through an intestinal colic, which Douglas would claim had been polio and his mother attributed his recovery to a miracle, telling Douglas that one day he would be President of the United States. His father died in Portland, Oregon, in 1904, when Douglas was six years old, Douglas would later claim his mother had been left destitute. After moving the family from town to town in the West, his mother, William, like the rest of the Douglas family, worked at odd jobs to earn extra money, and a college education appeared to be unaffordable. He was the valedictorian at Yakima High School and did enough in school to earn a scholarship to Whitman College in Walla Walla. While at Whitman, Douglas became a member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity and he worked at various jobs while attending school, including as a waiter and janitor during the school year, and at a cherry orchard in the summer. Picking cherries, Douglas would say later, inspired him to a legal career. He once said of his early interest in the law, I worked among the very, very poor, the migrant laborers, the Chicanos, I saw cruelty and hardness, and my impulse was to be a force in other developments in the law. Douglas was elected Phi Beta Kappa, participated on the debate team, after graduating in 1920 with a B. A. in English and economics, he taught English and Latin at Yakima high schools for the next two years, hoping to earn enough to attend law school. Finally, he said, I decided it was impossible to save money by teaching. He traveled to New York, with hopes to attend the Columbia Law School, six months later, Douglas funds were running out. The appointments office at the law school told him that a New York firm wanted a student to prepare a correspondence course for law. Douglas earned $600 for his work, enabling him to stay in school, hired for similar projects, he saved $1,000 by semesters end. His wife Mildred worked as a schoolteacher to support him throughout law school and he graduated fifth in his class in 1925, although he later claimed to have been second
6.
Tom C. Clark
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Clark was born in Dallas, Texas, on September 23,1899, the son of Virginia Maxey, and William Henry Clark. His parents had moved from Mississippi to Texas, his father became the youngest man ever elected president of the Texas Bar Association to that time. Young Tom attended the public schools including Dallas High School and received honors for debate and oratory. He then attended the Virginia Military Institute for a year, in 1918 Clark volunteered to serve in World War I with the U. S. Army, but his weight was too low. However, the Texas National Guard accepted him, and he served as an infantryman, after the war ended, Clark enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, receiving an A. B. degree in 1921. He then began studies and received a law degree from the University of Texas School of Law. He was a brother of Delta Tau Delta fraternity, and later served as their international president, upon admission to the Texas bar, Clark set up a law practice in his home town from 1922 to 1937. He left private practice to serve Dallas as civil district attorney from 1927 to 1932 and he then resumed his private practice for four years. Clark, a Democrat, joined the Justice Department in 1937 as an assistant to the U. S. attorney general. He later moved to the antitrust division, then run by legendary trust-buster Thurman Arnold, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor the following year, Clark was named by Attorney General Francis Biddle as the Civilian Coordinator of the Alien Enemy Control Program. Clark also was appointed to head up a new War Frauds unit created to investigate and prosecute corruption by government contractors, during this period he worked closely with, and befriended Harry Truman, whose Truman Committee was investigating war frauds. One, William Colepaugh, was an American citizen, while the other, the prosecution took place before a military tribunal on Governor’s Island in New York, only the third such military trial in the nation’s history. Media coverage of Clark’s nomination was generally favorable, and reflected the strength of Clark’s legal and political skills, as a short article in Life Magazine stated, “He is a good prosecutor and good lawyer, but most of all he is a thorough politician. ”. As attorney general, Clark initially continued to focus a good deal of the energy on prosecuting war fraud crimes. Clark and the White House also challenged John Lewis, the head of the United Mine Workers union, Clark played an important role in support of President Truman’s pioneering efforts in civil rights, helping to bring the power of the federal government behind civil rights enforcement. The most important of the briefs he filed was in Shelley v. Kraemer, Clark also helped guide the creation of a presidentially established committee on civil rights. The report had an important and lasting influence on civil rights providing, as Tom Clark later said, important early anti-Communist cases during his tenure include the Smith Act, Coplon, and Hiss-Chambers cases. Clarks anti-communist efforts also emphasized the promotion of the values of democracy, History, including the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Mayflower Compact
7.
Sherman Minton
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Sherman Shay Minton was a Democratic United States Senator from Indiana and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. After attending college and law school, he served as a captain in World War I, following which he launched a legal and political career. In 1930, after multiple failed attempts, and serving as a regional leader in the American Legion. Four years later, Minton was elected to the United States Senate, during the campaign, he defended New Deal legislation in a series of addresses in which he suggested it was not necessary to uphold the Constitution during the Great Depression crisis. Mintons campaign was denounced by his opponents, and he received more widespread criticism for an address that became known as the You Cannot Eat the Constitution speech. As part of the New Deal Coalition, the fiercely partisan Minton championed President Franklin D. Roosevelts unsuccessful court packing plans in the Senate and became one of his top Senate allies. After Minton failed in his 1940 Senate re-election bid, Roosevelt appointed him as a judge to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. After Roosevelts death, President Harry Truman, who had developed a friendship with Minton during their time together in the Senate. He was confirmed by the Senate on October 4,1949, by a vote of 48 to 16,15 Republicans and he served on the Supreme Court for seven years. In 1956, poor health forced Mintons retirement, after which he traveled and lectured until his death in 1965, historians note the unusual contrast between his role as a partisan liberal Senator and his role as a conservative jurist. They attribute his shift in position as a reaction to the relationship between the New Deal senators and the conservative 1930s Court, which ruled much of the New Deal legislation unconstitutional. When Minton became a Supreme Court Justice, the Senate had become more conservative, as a Justice, Minton frequently played the role of peace-maker and consensus builder during a period when the Court was riven with feuds. He generally ruled in favor of order over freedom as a result of his interpretation of governmental powers. These rulings and their limited impact lead some historians to have an opinion of his judicial record. Other historians point out Mintons strong commitment to his principles as a valuable attribute. In 1962, the Sherman Minton Bridge in southern Indiana and the Minton-Capehart Federal Building in Indianapolis were named in his honor, Sherman Minton was born on October 20,1890, to John Evan and Emma Livers Minton, in their Georgetown, Indiana, home. He was the third of the five children and was nicknamed Shay because of his younger brothers inability to properly pronounce Sherman. Mintons paternal grandfather, Jonathan Minton, was killed during the American Civil War, Minton received his basic education in a two-room schoolhouse in Georgetown, which he attended through eighth grade
8.
NAACP
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Du Bois, Mary White Ovington and Moorfield Storey. Its mission in the 21st century is to ensure the political, educational, social and their national initiatives included political lobbying, publicity efforts, and litigation strategies developed by their legal team. The group enlarged its mission in the late 20th century by considering issues such as police misconduct, the status of foreign refugees. Its name, retained in accordance with tradition, uses the common term colored people. The NAACP bestows annual awards to people of color in two categories, Image Awards are for achievement in the arts and entertainment, and Spingarn Medals are for outstanding achievement of any kind and its headquarters is in Baltimore, Maryland. The NAACP is headquartered in Baltimore, with regional offices in New York, Michigan, Georgia, Maryland, Texas, Colorado. Each regional office is responsible for coordinating the efforts of state conferences in that region, local, youth, and college chapters organize activities for individual members. In the U. S. the NAACP is administered by a 64-member board, julian Bond, Civil Rights Movement activist and former Georgia State Senator, was chairman until replaced in February 2010 by health-care administrator Roslyn Brock. For decades in the first half of the 20th century, the organization was led by its executive secretary. James Weldon Johnson and Walter F. White, who served in that role successively from 1920 to 1958, were more widely known as NAACP leaders than were presidents during those years. Departments within the NAACP govern areas of action, local chapters are supported by the Branch and Field Services department and the Youth and College department. The Legal department focuses on cases of broad application to minorities, such as systematic discrimination in employment, government. The Washington, D. C. bureau is responsible for lobbying the U. S. government, the goal of the Health Division is to advance health care for minorities through public policy initiatives and education. As of 2007, the NAACP had approximately 425,000 paying and non-paying members, the NAACPs non-current records are housed at the Library of Congress, which has served as the organizations official repository since 1964. The records held there comprise approximately five million items spanning the NAACPs history from the time of its founding until 2003, in 1905, a group of thirty-two prominent African-American leaders met to discuss the challenges facing people of color and possible strategies and solutions. They were particularly concerned by the Southern states disenfranchisement of blacks starting with Mississippis passage of a new constitution in 1890, through 1908, southern legislatures dominated by white Democrats ratified new constitutions and laws creating barriers to voter registration and more complex election rules. In practice, this caused the exclusion of most blacks and many whites from the political system in southern states. Black voter registration and turnout dropped markedly in the South as a result of such legislation, men who had been voting for thirty years in the South were told they did not qualify to register
9.
African Americans
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African Americans are an ethnic group of Americans with total or partial ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa. The term may also be used to only those individuals who are descended from enslaved Africans. As a compound adjective the term is usually hyphenated as African-American, Black and African Americans constitute the third largest racial and ethnic group in the United States. Most African Americans are of West and Central African descent and are descendants of enslaved peoples within the boundaries of the present United States. On average, African Americans are of 73. 2–80. 9% West African, 18–24% European, according to US Census Bureau data, African immigrants generally do not self-identify as African American. The overwhelming majority of African immigrants identify instead with their own respective ethnicities, immigrants from some Caribbean, Central American and South American nations and their descendants may or may not also self-identify with the term. After the founding of the United States, black people continued to be enslaved, believed to be inferior to white people, they were treated as second-class citizens. The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited U. S. citizenship to whites only, in 2008, Barack Obama became the first African American to be elected President of the United States. The first African slaves arrived via Santo Domingo to the San Miguel de Gualdape colony, the ill-fated colony was almost immediately disrupted by a fight over leadership, during which the slaves revolted and fled the colony to seek refuge among local Native Americans. De Ayllón and many of the colonists died shortly afterwards of an epidemic, the settlers and the slaves who had not escaped returned to Haiti, whence they had come. The first recorded Africans in British North America were 20 and odd negroes who came to Jamestown, as English settlers died from harsh conditions, more and more Africans were brought to work as laborers. Typically, young men or women would sign a contract of indenture in exchange for transportation to the New World, the landowner received 50 acres of land from the state for each servant purchased from a ships captain. An indentured servant would work for years without wages. The status of indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland was similar to slavery, servants could be bought, sold, or leased and they could be physically beaten for disobedience or running away. Africans could legally raise crops and cattle to purchase their freedom and they raised families, married other Africans and sometimes intermarried with Native Americans or English settlers. By the 1640s and 1650s, several African families owned farms around Jamestown and some became wealthy by colonial standards and purchased indentured servants of their own. In 1640, the Virginia General Court recorded the earliest documentation of slavery when they sentenced John Punch. One of Dutch African arrivals, Anthony Johnson, would own one of the first black slaves, John Casor
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