Profile -- Week 2 William Henry Hastie (1904-1976) William Henry Hastie was the first African American to serve as a federal trial judge. He also became the nation's first black federal appellate judge. During his long and illustrious career in law and public service, Hastie also served as a teacher, attorney in private practice, senior government official with the U.S. Department of the Interior and the War Department, Howard University law school dean, and the first black governor of the Virgin Islands. Presented with the Spingarn Medal by the NAACP, he was cited "for his distinguished career as a jurist and as an uncompromising champion of equal justice." Hastie was born in Knoxville, Tennessee on November 17, 1904. He attended primary schools in Knoxville and then in Washington, DC, after his father accepted a position at the United States Pension Bureau. After graduating from Washington's Dunbar High School in 1921, he attended Amherst College. In 1925, Hastie graduated first in his class and was president of Amherst's Phi Beta Kappa chapter. Before entering Harvard Law School, he taught for two years at the Bordentown Manual Training School in New Jersey. Hastie graduated with an LLB from Harvard in 1930. Following Charles Hamilton Houston, he was only the second African American to be a member of the Harvard Law Review. He also earned a doctor of juridical science from Harvard in 1933. In 1930, Hastie joined the law firm of Houston and Houston in Washington, DC, working with Charles Hamilton Houston and Houston's father. After Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president in 1933, Hastie was appointed assistant solicitor for the U.S. Department of the Interior, beginning his career with the federal government. At the Department of the Interior, he helped draft the Organic Act of 1936, which provided a charter of government for the U.S. Virgin Islands. The act abolished property requirements for voting and guaranteed civil liberties for residents of the territory, acquired from Denmark in 1917. At the urging of Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, Franklin Roosevelt nominated Hastie to a position on the U.S. District Court for the Virgin Islands. In spite of opposition in the U.S. Senate, Hastie was confirmed in March 1937. Two years later, he resigned to become dean of the Howard University School of Law. In 1940, however, he was persuaded to join the War Department as a civilian aide to Secretary Henry Stimson with special responsibility for "matters of policy which pertain to Negroes, or important questions arising thereunder." Hastie achieved some civil rights successes while at the War Department. However, frustrated by racial discrimination and the persistence of segregation in the armed forces during World War II, he resigned in protest in January 1943. The action was widely regarded as courageous and potentially damaging to his career. Shortly after his departure from the War Department, Hastie wrote "On Clipped Wings: The Story of Jim Crow in the Army Air Corps." From the 1930s on, Hastie was a key advisor and litigation strategist for the struggle for civil rights for African Americans. He served on the Board of Directors of the NAACP, working closely with, among others, Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall. In 1944, he and Marshall argued the case of Smith v. Allwright before the U.S. Supreme Court. In a landmark decision, the Court ruled that the restrictive "white primary" of the Democratic Party of Texas denied Lonnie Smith, a black doctor, his constitutional right to vote guaranteed under the Fifteenth Amendment. President Harry Truman appointed Hastie to serve as governor of the Virgin Islands in 1946. In 1949 Truman nominated him to be a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, based in Philadelphia. Hastie served on this court for 22 years, until his retirement from the federal bench in 1971. During his last three years on the court, he was chief judge. Hastie served as a trustee to Amherst College and Temple University. His collected papers are in the library of Harvard Law School. Both his son, William Henry Hastie Jr., and his daughter, Karen Hastie Williams, are lawyers. In 1976, Hastie died in East Norriton, Pennsylvania, at the age of 71. Looking back in 1973, Hastie reflected, "In 1930 a few persons had planned and initiated the campaign to change the racist character of our legal order. By 1950, the black community, a substantial part of the white community, and the government of the United States had joined in support of this effort. And, in its 1950 decisions, the Supreme Court responded by making clear its willingness to reexamine the fundamental question of the constitutionality of imposed racial segregation, without predisposition in favor of the rationale of Plessy v. Ferguson. The road ahead lay short and straight to the objective, an equalitarian legal order, that had been set twenty years earlier."* *"Toward an Equalitarian Legal Order," 407 Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, quoted on the website of the Just the Beginning Foundation Photo Usage: Permission to use the above photo was granted by the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. Black History Month 2003 | Links