Keith, Damon Jerome

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Keith, Damon Jerome

July 4, 1922

The federal judge Damon Jerome Keith was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. He earned an A.B. in 1943 from West Virginia State College, then served as a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1946. In 1949 he received an LL.B. from Howard University. He returned to Detroit and from 1951 to 1955 worked as an attorney at the Office of the Friend of the Court. In 1956 he received an LL.M. from Wayne State University. Keith was a founding member of the Detroit law firm of Keith, Conyers, Anderson, Brown, and Whals, where he was a full partner from 1964 to 1967. During his years in private practice, he was active in civil rights work as president of the Detroit Housing Commission (1958–1967), chairman of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission (1964–1967), and in other organizations, as well as being an active member in both the Detroit Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America and the Tabernacle Baptist Church.

In 1967 President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the U.S. Federal District Court for Michigan. Among his most important decisions, often referred to by legal scholars as the Keith Decision, was the case of United States v. U.S. District Court (1971), in which he ruled that warrantless wiretaps, even those ordered by the president, are unconstitutional.

In 1974 Keith was awarded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)'s Spin-garn Medal. Three years later President Jimmy Carter appointed Keith to the Sixth Circuit, comprising Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Michigan. In 1979, in a widely noticed opinion, Keith, who has a reputation as a liberal Democrat, ruled in favor of the Detroit Police Department's affirmative action hiring program.

Keith has served as the first vice president of the Detroit chapter of the NAACP. In 1987 Chief Justice William Rehnquist appointed Keith national chair of the Judicial Conference Committee on the Bicentennial of the Constitution. In 1993 Wayne State University established, in Keith's honor, the Damon J. Keith Law Collection, the first archival collection devoted entirely to African-American lawyers and judges.

Keith was awarded the Thurgood Marshall Award in 1997 and the Edward J. Devitt Award for Distinguished Service to Justice in 1998. In 2001 an official portrait of Keith was unveiled in the U.S. Courthouse in Detroit. In 2004, at the age of eighty-two, Keith was still serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals.