Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr.

Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr. (September 19, 1907 - August 25, 1998) was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was known as a master of compromise and consensus building.

He was born in Suffolk, Virigina. He attended Washington and Lee University, garnering both an undergraduate and a law degree from there. He was elected president of student body as an undergraduate. At a leadership conference, he met Edward R. Murrow. They became close friends. He attended Harvard Law School for a master's degree.

During World War II, he spent more than three years in Europe and North Africa. He started as a First Lieutenant, but rose to the rank of Colonel. He worked mostly in intelligence, decoding German messages.

He was a partner for over a quarter of a century at Hunton, Williams, Gay, Powell and Gibson, a large Virginia law firm. He also played an important role in local community affairs. From 1952 to 1961, he was Chairman of the Richmond School Board. Here he was at the pinnacle of the racial segregation debate in education. The Richmond schools followed a policy of quiet defiance to the 1954 decision Brown vs. Board of Education mandating desegregation. In 1961, only two of 23,000 black students in Richmond attended school with white students.

He was involved in the development of Colonial Williamsburg, where he was both a trustee and general counsel and served as president of the American Bar Association from 1964 to 1965. In 1971, he wrote the famous Powell Memorandum [1] to a friend at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce calling for corporate America to become more aggressive in molding politics and law in the U.S. Corporate leaders heeded his call and, though his judging was not as extreme as that memo might indicate, Powell played a pivotal role in advancing corporate power with his majority opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti in 1978. That decision gave corporations a First Amendment “right” to influence ballot initiatives.

He and William Rehnquist were nominated by President Nixon on the same day to serve on the court. Powell took over the seat of Hugo Black. He served from January 7, 1972 to June 26, 1987. Powell was nearly 80 years old when he resigned his position as Supreme Court justice.

He was succeeded by Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy was the third nominee for his position. The first, Robert Bork, was not confirmed by the Senate. The second, Douglas H. Ginsburg withdrew his name from consideration.

In 1936, he married Josephine Pierce Rucker. They had three daughters and one son. His wife died in 1996. Justice Powell died at his home in Richmond, Virginia of pneumonia at the age of 90.