Bro. Justice Stevens

In January 1974, New York Governor Malcolm Wilson appointed Bro. Justice Stevens to the New York Court of Appeals—NY’s highest state court—to fill the vacancy caused by the election of Charles Breitel as Chief Judge. Bro. Justice Stevens was the first African American to hold a seat on the Court of Appeals of New York. This appointment to New York’s highest court gave Bro. Justice Stevens the highest rank of any African American in any state judicial system.

Bro. Justice Stevens attended law school at Boston University. In 1932 he became the second President of Phi Beta Sigma’s Boston’s Alumni Chapter, “Pi Beta Sigma.” Bro. Justice Stevens began the practice of law in Boston in 1936. Two years later, he moved to New York City.

 In the early 1940s, he was a counsel to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the Provisional Committee to Organize Colored Locomotive Firemen; both of which were organized by Phi Beta Sigma Brother, A. Phillip Randolph. He was later appointed by President Roosevelt to the Fair Employment Practices Committee.

In 1950, when Bro. Justice Stevens was elected to the New York Court of General Sessions, where he became the first African American to sit on that bench. In 1955, he was appointed by Governor W. Averell Harriman to the New York Supreme Court to fill a vacancy and was elected to a full, fourteen-year term later that year. Once again, he achieved a “first” by becoming the first African-American Supreme Court Justice in New York State. In 1958, having made a habit of being “the first,” Bro. Justice Stevens became the first African-American Associate Justice on the Appellate Division bench; and in 1969, Governor Nelson Rockefeller designated Justice Stevens as Presiding Justice of that Court, another first for an African American.

In 1974, he became the first African American on New York’s state highest court—The Court of Appeals—which also made him the first African American of any state to sit on the bench of a state’s highest court.