Detroit is mourning the death of native son and civil rights icon, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Damon Keith.
The 96-year-old Keith ruled on some of the most significant civil rights issues of the past half-century.
A grandson of slaves, Damon Keith withstood death threats when he ordered the de-segregation of the Pontiac school district and the Detroit Police Department.
Keith, an African American, said the tone of his judicial career was set when he studied under renowned Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
“The white man wrote those words, ‘Equal justice under law.’ When you leave this law school, I want you to make him live up to those things. And I have tried to do that.”
Keith also forbid the Nixon Administration from conducting warrantless wiretapping, and chastised the George W. Bush White House for holding secret deportation hearings, writing in an opinion that “Democracies die behind closed doors.”