Henry Billings Brown

01 / The Detroit story

The Detroit story

Henry Billings Brown, a Yale graduate from Massachusetts, came to Detroit around 1859, was admitted to the Michigan bar in 1860 and built a practice in admiralty law, the maritime law of the busy Great Lakes shipping trade. He served as a deputy U.S. marshal and assistant U.S. attorney, briefly as a Wayne County circuit judge, and taught admiralty at the University of Michigan and medical jurisprudence at the Detroit Medical College, forerunner of Wayne State's medical school. In 1875 President Grant appointed him judge of the U.S. District Court in Detroit, and he became a leading authority on admiralty law. In 1890 President Benjamin Harrison named him to the Supreme Court. There, in 1896, he wrote the majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson, upholding racial segregation under the doctrine of 'separate but equal,' a decision that stood until 1954 and is now regarded as one of the Court's worst. His diaries are in the Detroit Public Library, and he is buried at Elmwood.

Highlights

1. Associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1891–1906
2. Wrote the majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
3. U.S. District Judge for the Eastern District of Michigan, 1875–1890
4. Leading authority on Great Lakes admiralty law