Spottswood Robinson III

Spottswood William Robinson III was born on the twenty-sixth of July 1916 at Richmond, Virginia, the son of Spottswood William Robinson Jr. — a partner in the firm of Hewin and Robinson, attorneys at law — and Inez Clements Robinson. His paternal grandfather Spottswood William Robinson Sr. had served in the Reconstruction Virginia legislature from 1869 to 1871; the family was one of the most established Black professional families in the segregated Richmond of the twentieth century. He completed the segregated Armstrong High School of Richmond and entered the historically Black Virginia Union University in 1932 at sixteen. He withdrew in his third year to marry Marian Wilkerson and to support his family in the Depression years.

He enrolled at Howard University Law School in 1936 and graduated in 1939 — at the head of his class with the highest academic record in Howard's history at that date. He joined the firm of Hill, Martin and Robinson at Richmond in 1939, where he and Oliver Hill (placed in this archive) became across the following two decades the principal Virginia litigators of the NAACP campaign against segregation. He served simultaneously from 1948 to 1950 as faculty member at Howard Law School and from 1950 as dean of Howard Law School.

He was lead Virginia counsel in the Davis v. County School Board phase of Brown v. Board of Education and argued the Virginia case before the Supreme Court in December 1952 and December 1953 alongside Thurgood Marshall (placed in this archive). In 1957 he became the south-eastern regional counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and conducted the principal courtroom dismantling of Virginia Massive Resistance from 1957 to 1960.

President Kennedy appointed him to the United States Civil Rights Commission in 1961. President Johnson appointed him to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in March 1964 — making him the first African American to serve on the District of Columbia federal bench — and elevated him in 1966 to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He served on the D.C. Circuit for twenty-three years, including as Chief Judge from 1981 to 1986.

He died at Richmond on the eleventh of October 1998, at eighty-two.

He is honored here as the senior Brown v. Board counsel and Chief Judge of the D.C. Circuit.