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One more mini-thread on #JudgeDamonKeith. In my early scholarship I examined how Black judges were targeted w/recusal motions filed by white litigants in race discrimination cases. Keith was among those Black judges who decisively rejected efforts to remove him from race cases.
Baker v. Detroit in 1978 was a prime example. In my article Jydging the Judges in the Boston College Law Review, I described Judge Keith’s unequivocal response to the effort of white police officers to recuse him from hearing their challenge to affirmative action in hiring. 
Judge A.Leon Higginbogham, Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, and of course, the Hon. Constance Baker Motley all bear back similar challenges. This is part of the long history of presuming that Black judges lack the same impartiality that is automatically assumed for white judges.
Much can & should be said about the long & illustrious career of #JudgeDamonKeith who passed away this morning. But I am thinking right now abt the extraordinary dissent he wrote at age 93 from the 6th Circuit’s 2016 voter purge decision in Husted v A. Phillip Randolph Institute.
That dissent includes a moving & devastating account of those martyred in the fight for voting. The opinion includes photographs of those Judge Keith tells us we must remember. You can read his dissent in Husted here. politico.com/f/?id=00000157…
His words in the Husted dissent ring out today: “I will not forget. I cannot forget - indeed America cannot forget - the pain, the suffering, the sorrow, of those who died for equal protection and for this precious right to vote.” - Hon. Damon Keith
