John Marshall Harlan

John Marshall Harlan was born on 1 June 1833 in Boyle County, Kentucky, into a slaveholding family and was named after the great Chief Justice. He became a lawyer. Though he opposed abolition before the Civil War, he fought for the Union as colonel of a Kentucky regiment. After the war his views changed: he became a Republican and came to support the amendments that ended slavery and promised equal citizenship. President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1877, and he served for almost thirty-four years. Harlan was a devout Presbyterian elder who taught Sunday school. He became famous for his dissents. In the Civil Rights Cases (1883) he alone argued that Congress could forbid racial discrimination in inns, theatres and railways. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) he again stood alone, warning that segregation laws would plant seeds of race hate and declaring that the Constitution does not permit classes among citizens. His dissent was vindicated when the Court rejected 'separate but equal' in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. He died in Washington on 14 October 1911.

Faith: A fervently religious, conservative Old School Presbyterian. Source: Wikipedia

See also: Thurgood Marshall · John Marshall · Frederick Douglass