Born: November 17, 1904, Knoxville, TN

Education: Amherst College, B.A. valedictorian, 1925, Harvard Law School, LL.B., 1930, S.J.D., 1933

Died: April 14, 1976, Philadelphia, PA

Hastie “was considered one of the best legal minds in twentieth century jurisprudence,” wrote his colleague Robert Weaver. He grew up in Jim Crow Washington, DC and taught at Howard Law School, where he helped mentor the greatest generation of civil rights lawyers. Pursuing “equal protection,” he breached the color line as NAACP counsel, federal judge (1937–39, 1949–71), civilian aide to the secretary of war (1940–43), and governor of the Virgin Islands (1946–49).

Hastie's battle began years earlier. As leader of the “young Turks” in the Washington NAACP, he organized a “Jobs for Negroes” campaign and lobbied Federal departments to hire qualified blacks. Litigating NAACP cases, he argued Hocutt v. Wilson (1933), representing a black male applicant to the Pharmacy School at the University of North Carolina. He lost that case, but it was the NAACP's first challenge to segregated higher education and the “genesis” of Brown v. Board of Education. After he resigned from the War Department to protest racism, Hastie helped win Supreme Court victories in Smith v. Allwright (1944), eliminating the white primary election, and Morgan v. Virginia (1946), prohibiting segregation on interstate buses.