James Nabrit Jr.

James Madison Nabrit Jr. was born on the fourth of September 1900 at Atlanta, Georgia, the son of James Madison Nabrit Sr. — a Black Baptist minister of the Atlanta Wheat Street Baptist Church and the founding dean of the Morehouse College School of Theology — and Augusta Gertrude West Nabrit, the granddaughter of a slave and a Methodist minister. The Nabrits were Black professional Atlanta of the post-Reconstruction period.

He was placed at the Morehouse Academy at Atlanta and at the Morehouse College at Atlanta, completing the bachelor’s at Morehouse in 1923 valedictorian and Phi Beta Kappa. He took the LL.B. at the Northwestern University School of Law in 1927 — among the early Black graduates of the institution.

He was admitted in 1928 to the Illinois state bar and entered private practice at Chicago briefly. He moved to Houston, Texas in 1928 and taught government and political science at the Leland College at Baker, Louisiana from 1928 to 1930 and at the Arkansas State College from 1930 to 1932.

He was hired in 1932 by his former Northwestern Law School classmate Charles Hamilton Houston (placed in this archive) at the Howard University Law School at Washington, D.C. as professor of civil rights — the first dedicated civil-rights law course at any American law school. He held the Howard Law School professorship for fifty-three years until his retirement in 1985.

He was the principal civil-rights lecturer at the Howard Law School across the period and trained two generations of NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorneys — among them Thurgood Marshall (placed in this archive), Robert L. Carter (placed in this archive), Spottswood Robinson III (placed in this archive), and Constance Baker Motley (placed in this archive).

He argued at the NAACP-LDF the principal companion case to Brown v. Board of Education at the United States Supreme Court — Bolling v. Sharpe (1954), the District of Columbia school-segregation case decided on the same day as Brown. The Brown decision was at the level of state public schools and required the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause; the Bolling case was at the level of the federal District of Columbia public schools and required the Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause. Nabrit was the principal counsel of Bolling v. Sharpe; the case was decided on the seventeenth of May 1954, the same day as Brown.

He was named in 1960 the dean of the Howard University Law School and from 1960 to 1965 the second African American president of Howard University — the second after Mordecai Wyatt Johnson.

He was nominated by President Lyndon Johnson on the second of August 1965 as the United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations under United States Ambassador Arthur Goldberg — the second African American appointed at the deputy-permanent-representative-of-the-United States rank, after Ralph Bunche (placed in this archive). He served the United Nations Permanent Representative position from 1965 to 1967.

He returned to the Howard University presidency in 1968 for one further year and to the Howard University Law School professorship until 1985.

He died at Washington, D.C. on the twenty-seventh of December 1997 of complications of a heart attack, at ninety-seven.

He is honored here as the principal counsel of Bolling v. Sharpe.