You likely know by now that the legendary Damon Keith, a federal appeals judge who was often described as a giant in the battle for civil rights, died Sunday morning.
That description is both true – and vastly inadequate to describe what this man lived through and accomplished. When he was born, on the Fourth of July 1922, there were men and women in their 50s who had been born slaves, and some older who could remember the lash.
Damon Keith himself knew poverty and racism and the sting of segregation. He was a second-class citizen for much of his young life. He served in a Jim Crow army during World War II, and worked his way through college and law school with great difficulty.
Nevertheless, he persisted, and nevertheless, he triumphed. Though I met him a couple times in his later years, I can’t pretend to have known him, though I felt he radiated goodness. He did not seem to be bitter, though he endured treatment that make many of us explode.
When he was a young lawyer, Detroit judges often treated him with racism and contempt. Nearly everyone knows the story of how, when he was already a federal appeals judge, a white man tossed him his keys and asked him to park his car. That story is horrifying, but is so well known in part because Judge Keith never seemed to tire of telling it.
He knew very well that he was Damon Keith, and that nobody knows or cares who the idiot was who thought he was a parking lot attendant.
Today, you can read long accounts of his amazing life in both the Detroit and national newspapers, and his funeral will undoubtedly be a must-attend occasion for everyone in law and politics. For Judge Keith was not just a man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps when he was too poor to afford boots. He was the first federal judge to address de facto racial segregation in the north, in the Pontiac school busing case, and got death threats from the Klan as a result.
Damon Keith was the first to say in a legal opinion that “urban renewal” was often code for “Negro removal.” He wrote a landmark decision that said the Nixon administration could not wiretap American citizens without a court order, and thirty years later wrote another in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks that said the Bush Administration’s hearings aimed at deporting people couldn’t be closed to the public and the press.
“Democracies,” as he famously said then, “die behind closed doors.”
That just scratches the surface of who he was and what he did. You can easily find pictures of him with Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.
He was several years older than they were. But more than half a century after they were gone, Damon Keith was still here inspiring us.
If you want to know more, you might start by reading Peter Hammer and Trevor Coleman’s book Crusader for Justice.
But it might be even more important to think about not only who this man was, but who we are and what we’ve become. Had he died three years ago, I undoubtedly would say that here was a man who was born into a world where he couldn’t even eat in most restaurants, and lived to see a young black man nearly forty years his junior twice be elected President of the United States.
Today, however, the open-minded and noble America that honored itself by electing Barack Obama sometimes seems nowhere to be found. Damon Keith, had, I knew, seen cycles of history before. I wish he was still here to reassure us about what comes after this one.
