Cecil Poole

Cecil Francis Poole was born on the twenty-fifth of February 1914 at Birmingham, Alabama, the son of an Alabama coal miner of the Birmingham Tennessee Coal and Iron Company mining belt and a domestic. The family moved to Pittsburgh in 1918 when Poole was four — in flight from the post-First-World-War racial violence of the Birmingham mining country.

He was placed at the Westinghouse High School at Pittsburgh — among the principal Black-Pittsburgh high schools of the inter-war period — and at the University of Pittsburgh, completing the bachelor’s in 1936. He took the LL.B. at the University of Michigan Law School in 1938 and the LL.M. at Harvard Law School in 1939 — among the early Black graduates of both institutions.

He was admitted in 1939 to the Pennsylvania state bar and to the California state bar in 1942 — the latter at the time of his relocation to San Francisco for the United States Office of Price Administration position to which he had been appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

He served the United States Office of Price Administration at San Francisco from 1942 to 1946 as the regional attorney for the price-control enforcement programme — one of the first Black senior federal-attorney positions of the war period. He returned to private practice at the close of the war from 1946 to 1958, at the San Francisco firm of Edises, Treuhaft, Grossman, Burns, Hyman and Poole — at which he was one of the principal Black-San-Francisco attorneys of the post-war period.

He was named in 1958 by Governor Edmund G. ‘Pat’ Brown the clemency secretary of the State of California — the first African American gubernatorial clemency secretary of any United States state. He held the clemency-secretary position from 1958 to 1961 — the period during which Poole received and processed the principal clemency petitions for the principal California death-row inmates of the period.

He was nominated by President John F. Kennedy on the twenty-fifth of August 1961 as the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California — the first African American United States Attorney of any northern California federal district. He was confirmed by the Senate on the eighteenth of September 1961 and served the position from October 1961 until 1970 — the longest-serving United States Attorney of the Northern District in the period.

He was nominated by President Jimmy Carter on the seventh of June 1979 to the United States District Court for the Northern District of California and confirmed by the Senate on the fourteenth of June 1979 — the first African American district-court judge in northern California.

He was elevated by President Carter on the twenty-second of October 1979 to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and confirmed by the Senate on the twenty-fifth of October 1979. He served the Ninth Circuit for seventeen years through to his death in 1997.

He sat as a senior Ninth Circuit judge across the principal civil-rights, gay-rights, immigration-rights, and capital-punishment cases of the post-Carter West Coast federal judiciary — including the dissent in Bowers v. Hardwick at the Court of Appeals stage in 1986 and the principal pre-Lawrence v. Texas immigration cases of the 1990s.

He died at San Francisco on the twelfth of November 1997 of complications of a stroke, at eighty-three.

He is honored here as the first Black United States Attorney of northern California.