As a teenager, all  that I understood of the word 'activist federal  judge' was that, because of what they ruled, I didn't have to go to the back window of the town cafe to order my food and when there was a class trip to the skating rink, I and the other black students in the class could go, too.

Had it not been for jurists who were more committed to the principals of equality and justice contained in the Constitution than they were in preserving traditions rooted in the premise of  inequality and inferiority,  my life  would have been much  more difficult.
While some will argue about the evils of so called 'reverse discrimination',  it cannot come close  to the real and psychic pain of being  treated as an inferior in the eyes of the law.

Led by Charles Hamilton Houston in the early 1930's, the NAACP and, later, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, began dismantling the traditions of inequality through the courts, their bludgeoning tool being the Constitution.    The efforts of Houston's team eventually culminated in Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that broke the back of segregation by declaring 'separate but equal' unconstitutional.  From there emerged a plethora of Court decisions that began the arduous work of bringing the United States of America into compliance with its Constitution.

Such is the power and the good that can come from a courageous judiciary.  William Wayne Justice was one such courageous man.

Dr. Martin Luther  King, Jr.   had already been assassinated and the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th Century had already begun to wind down when President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed  Justice to the federal bench in  1968.
An AP story after Justice's death this past Tuesday summed up his life's work:   "His rulings affected schoolchildren, prisoners, minorities, immigrants and the disabled."

Justice, in a 1985 AP interview, said that  he loved the law and wanted to be remembered as a professional, a  judge who listened to the facts, divined the truth and then properly applied the law.

The grandson of a Confederate soldier, Justice made his rulings from one of the most conservative areas of a conservative state, Tyler, Texas.   In doing so, he sacrificed personal popularity on the altar of the law.  Simply put, his rulings that, among other things,  forced Texas to integrate its public schools -- a full 16 years after Brown v. Board; allow immigrant children access to education in English and in Spanish, and apply the principles of the Constitution to the lowest people on the human ladder, prisoners, made him one of the most hated men in Texas.

Even if we do nothing, the world  will naturally  gravitate toward fulfilling  the wishes of  the rich, the powerful and the majority.   

Consequently, blacks  could be lynched at will if the majority and the powerful were okay with it;  separate but equal could be anything but, as long as the majority and the powerful get their version of equal.  People who make us uncomfortable, be they prisoners or disabled persons, can be warehoused like pieces of furniture.

However, that is not America at its best.

America at its best is a work in progress.  "Activist judges' like  Justice enabled us to make some great strides in that work.

Kathy Clay-Little is the publisher of African American Reflections.