Nabrit, James Madison
Nabrit, James Madison
September 4, 1900
December 27, 1997
Born in Atlanta, Georgia, lawyer and educator James Madison Nabrit was the son of the Rev. J. M. and Gertrude Nabrit. In 1919 he received his high school diploma from Morehouse College, and four years later graduated from Morehouse with a B.A. degree. Although he left school in 1925 to teach political science and coach football at Leland College, Nabrit received a J.D. degree from Northwestern University Law School in 1927. While at Northwestern, he was an honor student and was elected to the Order of the Coif, the highest legal scholarship fraternity. After law school, he served as a dean at Arkansas State College for two years.
In 1930 Nabrit moved to Houston, Texas, where he practiced law. In his six years in Houston, he became involved in civil rights law. He participated in over twenty-five such cases, most of which were concerned with voting rights. In 1936 he began his twenty-four-year career at Howard University as an associate professor of law. While at Howard, he developed a syllabus that collected more than two thousand civil rights cases. He organized the first course in civil rights taught at a law school in the United States. In 1954 Nabrit served as the legal adviser to the governor of the Virgin Islands. He joined in the NAACP's legal assault on segregation, and he wrote one of the briefs opposing Jim Crow schools in the cases that led to the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision in 1954. In 1960 Nabrit was named President of Howard University, where he served for nine stormy years. Ironically, given his longtime fight for civil rights, he was assailed by militant students in the late 1960s as an Uncle Tom. In 1981 he received an honorary degree from Howard University.
See also Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas ; Civil Rights Movement, U.S.
Bibliography
"James Madison Nabrit." Negro History Bulletin 24, no. 4 (January 1961): 75–76.
Logan, Rayford. Howard University: The First Hundred Years. New York: New York University Press, 1969.
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