Henry Billings Brown

Henry Billings Brown was an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 29 December 1890 to 28 May 1906. A respected lawyer and U.S. District Judge in Detroit, Michigan, before ascending to the high court, Brown authored hundreds of opinions in his 31 years as a federal judge, including the majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which upheld the legality of racial segregation in public transportation and implicitly provided approval for the system of Jim Crow laws until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.