James Nabrit Jr.

James Nabrit, Jr., was born in Georgia on September 7, 1900. He graduated from Morehouse College in 1923 and from Northwestern University Law School in 1927. Nabrit taught school in Louisiana and Arkansas from 1927 to 1930. From 1930 to 1936 he practiced law in Houston and later taught law at Howard University from 1936 to 1960. In 1938, he started the first formal civil rights law course in the United States and would later become president of Howard University.   Beginning in the 1940s and through the 1950s, Nabrit handled a number of civil rights cases for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, working with prominent attorneys such as ThurgoodMarshall, who became the first African-American U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Notably, Nabrit argued Bolling v. Sharpe, a companion case of Brown v. Board of Education.