On this day in Black history, Justice Joseph Hatchett was sworn in as he became the first African American to serve on Florida’s highest court in 1975.
When he took the Florida bar exam, Jim Crow laws prevented him from staying at the very hotel where the test was being administered. Hatchett was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army in between graduating from FAMU and Howard Law.
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter named him to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, making Hatchett the first Black man to serve on the federal circuit in the Deep South.
All this and more on “Prime.”
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