Robert L. Carter, who as a civil rights lawyer argued the Brown v. Board of Education case both at the trial court in Topeka, Kan., and in the U.S. Supreme Court, died last week in New York City. He was 94.
Mr. Carter, who was a retired federal district judge in Manhattan, died Jan. 3 from complications of a stroke, The New York Times reported.
He was a chief lieutenant to Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in the 1940s and ‘50s when the organization led the legal assault on racial segregation in American education. He advocated using the research of psychologist Kenneth B. Clark, whose black and white “doll studies” suggested that segregation created feelings of inferiority among black schoolchildren.
