Damon Keith

Damon Jerome Keith was born on the fourth of July 1922 at Detroit, Michigan, the youngest of six children of Perry A. Keith — a Ford Motor Company assembly-line worker who had migrated from Atlanta during the First Great Migration — and Annie L. Williams Keith, a domestic worker and active member of the AME Church. He was educated at the Northwestern High School of Detroit, took the bachelor's at West Virginia State College in 1943, served as a sergeant in the United States Army from 1943 to 1946 in the segregated military police, and completed the LL.B. at Howard Law School in 1949 — five years after Thurgood Marshall (placed in this archive) had argued the Sweatt case from the same Howard institution.

He practised law in Detroit from 1949 to 1967 — including service in the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office and from 1958 as a member of the Detroit-based civil-rights firm Keith, Conyers and Anderson, alongside the future congressman John Conyers. He chaired the Michigan Civil Rights Commission from 1964 to 1967.

President Lyndon Johnson appointed him in October 1967 to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. He served on the District Court for the following ten years and was elevated by President Carter to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in 1977. He served on the Sixth Circuit for forty-two years — the second-longest African American tenure on any federal appeals court.

His decisive judicial opinion was United States v. Sinclair (1971) — the unanimous panel ruling holding that the Nixon administration's domestic wiretapping of antiwar activist John Sinclair without warrant violated the Fourth Amendment. The Supreme Court affirmed unanimously in 1972 in United States v. United States District Court — known thereafter in constitutional-law casebooks as the Keith Case — establishing the principle that the executive may not conduct domestic-security electronic surveillance without prior judicial approval. The opinion is one of the constitutional foundations of the modern doctrine on national-security surveillance and was cited in the legislative drafting of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

He also wrote the 2002 panel opinion in Detroit Free Press v. Ashcroft — holding that the Bush administration's closed-door immigration hearings of post-9/11 detainees violated the First Amendment — and the 2005 opinion striking down the Detroit Police Department's affirmative-action consent decree.

He died at Detroit on the twenty-eighth of April 2019, at ninety-six.

He is honored here as the author of the Keith Case.