Henry Billings Brown

Henry Billings Brown (born South Lee, Massachusetts March 2, 1836 - died Bronxville, New York September 4, 1913) was a Republican United States Supreme Court justice from January 5, 1891 to May 28, 1906. He is perhaps best known today as the author of the majority opinion of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court decision that upheld the legality of racial segregation in public transportation.

Related Topics:
March 2 - 1836 - September 4 - 1913 - Republican - United States Supreme Court - January 5 - 1891 - May 28 - 1906 - Plessy v. Ferguson - Racial segregation - Public transport

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Brown grew up in a New England merchant's family. He graduated from Yale, and received some formal legal training both at Yale and at Harvard, although he did not earn a law degree. His early law practice was in Detroit, where he specialized in admiralty law (i.e., shipping law on the Great Lakes). Brown hired a substitute to take his place in the Union Army during the Civil War. He served as U.S. Attorney and in 1875 was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. Brown authored a treatise on Admiralty Law, a work still used as a reference in Black's Law Dictionary. President Benjamin Harrison appointed Brown to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1890.

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Brown was generally a moderate justice, unwilling to allow government interference with business. He did, however, support the federal income tax in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. (1895). Although all but one of the justices voted with him in Plessy, Brown's having authored the Court's opinion establishing "separate but equal" as a constitutional doctrine has dimmed an otherwise decent record. Brown left diaries written from his college days until his appointment as a federal judge in 1875. They can be found in the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library. His diaries suggest that Brown was personally likable, but ambitious; depressed, and often full of doubt about himself. Near the end of his years on the Court he largely lost his eyesight. Brown is buried in Elmwood Cemetery in Detroit, a city now overwhelmingly African American and an irony that is unlikely to have pleased him.

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For references, see the entry about Brown in the Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States (an entry authored by the writer of this wiki piece), and an article about him by Professor Robert J. Glennon, Jr., at 44 Colo. L. Rev. 553 (1973). (My personal impressions about Brown come from reading his diaries in Detroit and his notebooks at the Yale Library.)

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