Judge Damon Keith's legacy looms large

It's one of the year's most-coveted invitations among Michigan's legal and political elite — an invite to the Soul Food Luncheon thrown every year by U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Damon J. Keith to honor Black History Month.

As the roughly 400 guests expected at Thursday's event approach the courthouse elevators, they'll pass a large bronze plaque spelling out the complete Bill of Rights.

There's just one name on the plaque — Judge Damon J. Keith — in recognition of his service during bicentennial celebrations for the U.S. Constitution in the late 1980s.

And that gets to the heart of the remarkable life story of this trailblazing judge, who some say epitomizes the very spirit of Black History Month. At 92, Keith is still actively serving both his country and the law.

Born into humble circumstances — Keith famously scrubbed toilets to support himself while studying for the Michigan bar — the judge's name now graces similar plaques hung in 300 federal courthouses and the FBI headquarters in Washington as chairman of the Judicial Conference Committee on the Bicentennial of the Constitution.

"What we tried to do with the conference committee was to remind Americans about the Bill of Rights and the constitution's bicentennial," Keith said. "We even took the message to sporting events all over the country."

Chief Justice Warren E. Burger appointed Keith to head the 6th Circuit's bicentennial committee 30 years ago. Two years later, Chief Justice William Rehnquist tapped Keith to lead the national effort, a vast educational enterprise that harnessed federal judges nationwide.

Keith's appointment by the conservative Rehnquist still amuses the Detroiter.

"I'm known as a liberal," he said with a laugh. "I don't know why Rehnquist appointed me chairman out of all federal judges in country."

Observers might say Keith's stature in the federal judiciary had a lot to do with that. It's not every jurist who stood up to the Nixon administration, barring its practice of warrant-less wiretapping. The result was a seminal judgment that's come down in law texts as the "Keith Decision."

Add Keith's 2002 decision rejecting the Bush administration's secret deportation hearings for alleged terrorists, with its stinging rebuke that "Democracies die behind closed doors," and you begin to understand why Robert M. Ackerman, former dean at Wayne State University Law School, admires Keith so much.

"The first amendment is alive and well in no small part because of Judge Keith's efforts," Ackerman told The Detroit News several years ago.

Keith's service on the bicentennial conference committee was "a very big deal," said federal Judge Eric L. Clay, who serves with Keith on the 6th Circuit Appeals Court in Detroit. He served as a clerk in his office in 1972 and 1973. "Luminaries in the judiciary were heavily invested as participants in ceremonial events as well as programs and panel discussions."

Naturally, Clay will be at Thursday's 28th annual Soul Food Luncheon, paying tribute to the man he admires both as a jurist and a civil-rights leader.

"It's difficult to juggle the roles of judge and leader without transgressing some rule of judicial propriety," Clay said, "but Judge Keith was always able to handle that with intelligence, grace and good humor."

Clay won't be the only former clerk present. In longstanding tradition, many of Keith's one-time clerks return for the lunch. Flying in from Washington on Thursday morning will be the Rev. Ademuyiwa J. Bamiduro, an attorney and Baptist pastor who clerked for Keith from 2006-07.

"The judge was very good to all the law clerks," Bamiduro said, "and his judicial legacy is so rich. He's like family. Anytime he does anything, all his former law clerks try to support him."

As for the education Bamiduro got in the judge's chambers, he said, "Oh, man! It was the absolute best. It was training not just for the legal field, but training for life."

Gov. Jennifer Granholm, another former clerk, won't be able to make Thursday's luncheon, but she treasures her memories of working with Keith.

"It was an incredible privilege to serve as a law clerk to Judge Keith," Granholm wrote in an email. "He is an icon in the civil rights community and a role model to many."

The highlight of the Soul Food Luncheon is always the presentation of the Soul and Spirit Humanitarian Award, which Keith said goes to "a person of color who has made a contribution to our community, state and nation." This year the award honors Walter Douglas, chairman of Southfield's Avis Ford who was formerly president of New Detroit Inc.

As usual, the powerful will be well represented. Gov. Rick Snyder has been a regular, but will probably miss this year, aides say, because of his recent release from the hospital.

Certain to be there, Keith says, will be U.S. District Chief Judge Gerald E. Rosen, who acquired something like rock star status for his role negotiating the "grand bargain" that helped resolve Detroit's bankruptcy and saved the collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Keith reports Mayor Mike Duggan said he'll attend, "and we got a note saying Edsel Ford will try to make it. Of course," he added, "he and Walt Douglas are good friends."

Meet Walter Douglas

Walter E. Douglas is chairman of Avis Ford in Southfield, one of the most successful Ford dealerships in the country.

A native North Carolinian, Douglas moved to the Motor City in 1967 to take a job as a systems analyst at the new IRS Data Center. The disturbances that summer, however, awoke the civic activist within the computer programmer.

Douglas joined New Detroit Inc. in 1972, one of the nation's first urban-coalition organizations, and served as its third president from 1978-85. He resigned to re-enter the private sector, buying Avis Ford from Warren Avis, founder of Avis Rent-a-Car.

In 2010, Black Enterprise magazine named Avis Ford its auto dealer of the year.

Douglas has served on numerous corporate and philanthropic boards including the Henry Ford Health System, Health Alliance Plan, Auto Club Group, Skillman Foundation and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. He is the author of "The Activist Entrepreneur."

Douglas is a graduate of North Carolina Central University, and holds honorary doctorates from there and Wayne State University.

He has been married to Retha Hughes-Douglas for more than 50 years. They have three children.