Henry Billings Brown
Henry Billings Brown was an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from January 5, 1891 to May 28, 1906. An admiralty lawyer and U.S. District Judge in Detroit before ascending to the high court, Brown authored hundreds of opinions in hisyears as a federal judge, including the majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson that upheld the legality of racial segregation in public transportation.
Brown was born in South Lee, Massachusetts, and grew up in Massachusetts and Connecticut. His was a New England merchant family. Brown entered Yale College at 16, where he was a member of Alpha Delta Phi fraternity. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree there in 1856. Among his undergraduate classmates were Chauncey Depew, later a U.S. Senator from New York, and David Josiah Brewer, who became Browns colleague on the Supreme Court. Depew roomed across the hall from Brown for three years in Old North Middle Hall, and remembered a feminine quality which led to his being called Henrietta, though there never was a more robust, courageous and decided man in meeting the problems of life After a yearlong tour of Europe, Brown attended a term of legal education at Yale Law School and another at Harvard Law School. Many lawyers at the time did not earn law degrees, and he did not.
Source: Wikipedia