Legal education and military service
Carter was born in Careyville, Florida. He graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1937, studied law at Howard and earned a Columbia law master's degree in 1941. He served in the Army Air Corps from 1941 to 1944.
Military segregation shaped his experience of unequal treatment. After discharge and the New York bar examination, he joined the NAACP's legal work as an assistant to Thurgood Marshall. His professional training became part of an organized campaign against segregation.
Evidence and the Brown litigation
Carter helped turn experiences of segregated schooling into courtroom evidence. In 1950 he worked in South Carolina with Marshall, Spottswood Robinson and psychologist Kenneth Clark. The following year he and Jack Greenberg helped local Topeka lawyers prepare witnesses.
He argued the Topeka Brown case before the Supreme Court. The work joined local families, lawyers and expert testimony in challenging segregation itself, rather than simply comparing buildings and equipment. The eventual 1954 decision was the Court's judgment in a wider litigation effort.
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Counsel and federal judge
Carter became the NAACP's general counsel in 1956 and served until 1968, followed by research and private practice. President Richard Nixon nominated him to the Southern District of New York in 1972; Senate confirmation and his commission followed in July.
He took senior status in 1986 and continued judicial service until his death in 2012. His 2005 memoir A Matter of Law preserved his own account of civil-rights struggle alongside the formal record of his legal career.