A white, Republican judge who obliterated the last straggling Jim Crow laws, with his role in 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, his later desegregation rulings, and by allowing the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery in March of 1965. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr said that he had "given true meaning to the word 'justice'"; the Ku Klux Klan deemed him "the most hated man in Alabama."