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About Judge Keith
Our Story
Damon J. Keith lived through segregation, survived a race riot in 1943, served in a segregated army, and came home to spend the rest of his life dismantling the very racialized systems that had tried to diminish him. He became one of the most consequential federal judges in American history. This center carries his name and his conviction that in order for democracy to be fully realized, we have to continuously struggle for it.
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The Life of Judge Keith
1922 · A Child of Segregated Detroit
Our story begins on July 4, 1922, with the birth of Damon J. Keith in Detroit, Michigan. Damon was born in a segregated neighborhood on the near west side of Detroit and graduated from a partially integrated Northwestern High School.
1943 · A Summer That Changed Everything
Damon attended West Virginia State College, then a Historically Black College, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1943, a summer that was momentous and tragic. Damon graduated from college, suffered the loss of his father, survived race riots in Detroit, and was inducted into a segregated army to serve in WWII.
1950s · The Beginnings of a Legal Legacy
After the war, Damon attended Howard University Law School and returned to Detroit to practice law. In the 1950s, attorney Keith established himself as a lawyer, was part of a team that revitalized the Detroit Branch of the NAACP and founded his own successful law firm, Keith, Conyers, Anderson, Brown & Wahls.
1963 · From Advocate to Architect of Justice
In 1963, Keith was appointed founding Co-Chair of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission. Four years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him Federal District Court Judge for the Eastern District of Michigan. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter elevated him to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Over 52 years on the bench and across five decades of landmark decisions, Judge Keith became a judicial giant. He hired more women law clerks and clerks of color than any judge in U.S. history.
As a federal judge, Judge Keith decided landmark case after landmark case, decade after decade. He stood up against President Nixon, ruling that no one, not even the President, was above the law, holding that the President could not invoke a blanket national security justification to avoid 4th Amendment demands for a judicial warrant to issue a search warrant. He challenged housing segregation in Hamtramck, school segregation in Pontiac, and employment discrimination at Detroit Edison. He defended affirmative action in the Detroit Police Department. And after September 11, when President George W. Bush sought to close deportation hearings to the press on blanket national security grounds, Judge Keith wrote words that still echo: “Democracies die behind closed doors.”
The Center: A Legacy Institutionalized
On May 17, 2010 — the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education — ground was broken for the building that would bear Judge Keith’s name. On October 19, 2011, the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights opened its doors. Today, the Center carries Judge Keith’s legacy forward as an active force in Detroit’s present and in defining its future."
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