By Bankole Thompson
There are moments when representation is an achievement. There are other moments when representation must answer a harder question: What are you doing with the opportunity that history fought to place in your hands?
That question has been increasingly occupying my mind as I watch a new generation of Black lawyers ascend to courtrooms across Michigan.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has appointed a number of Black lawyers to judicial positions during her tenure, including courts serving Detroit, Wayne County and across the rest of the state. I applaud the widening of doors that for generations were deliberately closed to Black people.
At the same time, I have watched some recent judicial appointments in Michigan with profound disappointment.
That is why I refuse to confuse access with excellence. And I refuse to believe that because someone who looks like me has been given a robe, the obligation of scrutiny somehow disappears.
In fact, precisely the opposite should be true. I knew the late federal Judge and civil rights hero Damon J. Keith well.
When I was editor of the Michigan Chronicle, there were Saturday evenings when I would spend time with Judge Keith at the Riverfront Towers apartment of my late publisher, Sam Logan. The three of us would sit overlooking the Detroit River and discuss the condition of Black life, politics, civil rights, journalism, power, leadership and the unfinished business of American democracy.
Those conversations mattered to me. Because here was a federal judge who had confronted some of the most powerful forces in America yet remained deeply concerned about what was happening to ordinary Black people in Detroit and across the nation.
Keith understood that accomplishment did not absolve you of obligation. It increased it. That is the standard I find myself thinking about in 2026.
President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Judge Keith to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan in 1967. President Jimmy Carter later elevated him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. His judicial career would span more than half a century.
But another assignment given to Judge Keith speaks directly to the argument I am making in this column.
In 1987, as the nation marked the bicentennial of the United States Constitution, Judge Keith served as chairman of the Judicial Conference of the United States Committee on the Bicentennial of the Constitution.
Consider the historical weight of that responsibility. A Black man born into an America still governed by racial segregation was entrusted with helping the federal judiciary commemorate the 200th anniversary of a constitution written at a time when people who looked like him could be enslaved.
Judge Keith understood the contradiction. But he also understood something essential about constitutional democracy and that is reverence for the Constitution does not require silence about America’s failures. The deepest form of constitutional fidelity is insisting that the promises of democracy be extended to those whom the nation once excluded from them.
That was the intellectual and moral seriousness Judge Keith brought to the law. His greatness, therefore, cannot be measured simply by how long he wore the robe. It was measured by what he was prepared to risk while wearing it. He confronted racial segregation, employment discrimination, government surveillance and presidential power.
When the Nixon administration asserted extraordinary authority to conduct warrantless domestic surveillance in the name of national security, Judge Keith stood on the Constitution. The Supreme Court ultimately affirmed the constitutional principle at stake.
Decades later, confronting government secrecy after Sept. 11, Judge Keith issued a warning that belongs among the most consequential declarations ever written by an American jurist: “Democracies die behind closed doors.”
That sentence was not simply eloquence. It was judicial courage distilled into a warning. Judge Keith belonged to a generation of Black lawyers for whom the law was never merely an occupation. They understood the law because they had experienced what happened when it abandoned them.
They came from the intellectual tradition of Charles Hamilton Houston, the architect of the legal strategy that destroyed Jim Crow and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. They understood that mastery of the law was necessary because Black lawyers could not afford mediocrity.
They had to know more, prepare harder and argue better. And frequently possess twice the courage simply to enter rooms where their presence itself was being questioned. That history is why we should demand something profound from the generation inheriting their victories.
Representation matters. It matters profoundly in a justice system that historically excluded Black lawyers from positions of authority while disproportionately subjecting Black people to the authority of that same system. But representation cannot become the destination.
Excellence must be the destination.
We should want Black judges whose scholarship is formidable, whose preparation is unmistakable, whose courtroom presence commands respect without demanding deference, whose understanding of constitutional principles runs deeper than political fashion and whose independence makes governors, mayors, prosecutors, corporations and powerful institutions understand that the courtroom belongs to justice not to them.
We need judges who understand the difference between possessing authority and exercising moral courage. And we need young Black lawyers who recognize that ambition alone is insufficient preparation for the bench. A judicial appointment should not simply become another impressive line on a résumé.
The robe is not a trophy. It is a trust.
And we do not have to look only to history to understand what that standard looks like. Former Oakland County Circuit Court Judge Denise Langford Morris has long represented to me the kind of judicial excellence I am talking about.
Over the years, I have been deeply impressed by her intellectual depth, the rigor of her thinking, the seriousness with which she approaches consequential questions and a brilliance that never needs theatrics to announce itself. Equally important is her judicial temperament which is measured, disciplined and grounded in an understanding that authority carries responsibility. And beneath those qualities is something I regard as indispensable and that is a deep concern for Black life and for what happens to people whose experiences can too easily become abstractions inside powerful institutions.
Langford Morris did not have to surrender that consciousness in order to honor the law; rather, it informed the seriousness with which she understood the human consequences of the law. That combination of intellectual excellence, temperament and conscience is precisely what I mean when I speak of the standard that Judge Damon Keith’s generation bequeathed to those who came after it. Representation may place you on the bench. It is depth, discipline and courage that determine what you do once you get there.
I was reminded of that inheritance recently under profoundly different circumstances. On Aug. 25, I stood before the family and mourners of Dr. William G. Anderson at Empowerment Church in Southfield and delivered his eulogy.
Dr. Anderson was 98.
He had worked alongside Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and served as president and founder of the Albany Movement in Georgia, one of the defining campaigns of the civil rights era. He later became a pioneering physician, educator and national leader in medicine.
I titled my eulogy, “William G. Anderson And The Empty Chair At The Constitutional Convention Of 1787.”
The empty chair represented those who were never invited to Philadelphia to participate in defining the meaning of American freedom including enslaved Black people, women, Native Americans and others whose humanity existed outside the boundaries of the constitutional imagination of that moment.
And here is the connection that should not be missed.
Two hundred years after that convention, Judge Damon Keith, a descendant of the people whom the original Constitution did not recognize as equal citizens was helping lead the federal judiciary’s commemoration of its bicentennial.
That is the arc of history. But history does not move by itself. People move it. Judge Keith moved it from the courtroom. Dr. Anderson moved it through medicine, education and the civil rights movement.
One interpreted the Constitution. The other belonged to a movement that forced the Constitution to confront people it had too often failed. Both understood that professional distinction divorced from public obligation was insufficient. Their generation presents an uncomfortable question to ours: What do we owe them?
What does a 30-year-old Black lawyer walking into a major law firm today owe a generation that could not enter many of those firms? What does a young Black prosecutor owe those who once faced a justice system in which prosecutors, juries and judges could operate with almost complete indifference to Black humanity? What does a newly appointed Black judge owe Judge Keith?
Not ideological conformity, racial favoritism or predetermined outcomes. They owe his generation something far more fundamental and that is excellence. They owe them intellectual seriousness, preparation, independence, understanding of history and the courage to stand alone when the Constitution demands it. And most importantly, they owe them the humility to understand that the seats they occupy did not suddenly materialize when an appointment letter arrived from the governor’s office.
Somebody paid for those seats.
They were paid for in courtrooms where Black lawyers were humiliated but returned the next morning prepared to argue. They were paid for at lunch counters. They were paid for on buses. They were paid for crossing bridges. They were paid for in careers denied and opportunities postponed. They were paid for by generations that understood they might never personally enjoy the America they were trying to create.
That history should weigh upon anyone who inherits its victories. This is especially important in Detroit. This city helped produce an extraordinary Black legal tradition. Judge Keith practiced law here before becoming a judge. He studied at Howard University School of Law, an institution central to the development of the legal strategy that dismantled American segregation. He belonged to an intellectual tradition associated with giants such as Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall.
Imagine what that generation required of itself. It was not intelligence but tenacity. It was not credentials but preparation. It was not opportunity but courage. That is the inheritance.
And this is where Gov. Whitmer and every governor entrusted with filling judicial vacancies should be challenged privately and publicly. Because qualification should be the beginning of the inquiry, not the end. When appointing judges, particularly to courts serving communities carrying the accumulated burdens of poverty, racial discrimination, incarceration and unequal access to legal resources, governors should search for more than competent lawyers with impressive networks.
They should look for intellectual depth and independence. They should examine lawyers who understand poor defendants as human beings rather than docket numbers, jurists whose reverence for constitutional rights does not change according to the political identity of the person invoking them and lawyers with the courage to tell power no. Because that was Judge Keith. Think about it. Presidents came and went during his long tenure. The political winds shifted but the principles remained. The principle remained.
Power must answer to the Constitution.
That is what judicial independence looks like. The lesson is especially important for Black America because the struggle was never simply about placing Black faces inside powerful institutions. The struggle was about transforming the meaning of those institutions. Justice Marshall did not fight merely so Black lawyers could enter courthouses. Hamilton Houston did not train a generation of legal warriors simply so their descendants could acquire prestigious titles. Dr. Anderson did not confront segregation so another generation could merely enjoy the privileges produced by his struggle. And Judge Keith did not confront some of the most powerful institutions in America simply so another generation could admire his portrait hanging on a courthouse wall.
Their lives constitute a demand.
What will you do with the doors they opened? That question should follow every young Black lawyer entering the profession in Michigan and across the country. It should follow every Black prosecutor possessing the enormous authority of the state. It should follow every Black lawyer seeking a judicial appointment. And once appointed, it should follow every Black judge into chambers each morning. Not because Black judges must decide cases according to race. They must not. Their obligation is to the Constitution, the law and equal justice.
But history imposes another responsibility and that is never forgetting how expensive the journey to that courtroom was. There were lawyers who endured segregation so another generation could enter the courthouse through the front door. There were lawyers who could not join certain firms. There were lawyers whose intelligence was questioned before they uttered their first argument.
There were men like Dr. Anderson who challenged the racial order when doing so carried consequences far more serious than an unfavorable headline. And there were judges like Judge Keith who understood that a judicial robe could either become insulation from the struggles outside the courthouse or an instrument for ensuring that the Constitution belonged equally to those without power.
Judge Keith chose courage. The next generation does not have to imitate him. But it should understand why he mattered.
We do not need replicas. We need successors in intellectual seriousness, preparation, independence and excellence. And above everything else, successors in courage. Because history will not ultimately remember how many Black judges were appointed.
History will ask what they did once they reached the bench. Judge Damon Jerome Keith answered that question for more than half a century. Dr. William G. Anderson’s generation answered it through a lifetime of struggle.
The doors are open now. The question for the generation walking through them as Gov. Whitmer continues her appointments is far more demanding: What will you do once you are inside?
Bankole Thompson is a nationally acclaimed journalist, author, keynote speaker and public intellectual whose work interrogates power, democracy and economic justice. He is founder and chairman of The PuLSE Institute and a twice-weekly opinion columnist at The Detroit News. In June, Thompson delivered the opening Juneteenth keynote address at the 2026 National Civil Rights Conference in Detroit addressing, “The Battle for America’s Story: Media, Power and Economic Justice.” His forthcoming seventh book is titled, Bankole Thompson’s 12 Moral Questions: Frederick Douglass and the Soul of America at 250. Dr. Lawrence Edward Carter Sr., founding dean of the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse College wrote the foreword to the book. He can be reached at bankole@bankolethompson.com
