Former Justice Leander Shaw appointed on January 10, 1983

On January 10, 1983, Florida civil rights lawyer and judge Leander J. Shaw, Jr., was appointed by Governor Bob Graham to the Florida Supreme Court.

Justice Leander Shaw during November 20, 2000, oral arguments.

He later became the Court's first African-American Chief Justice in 1990. It was the crest of a 20-year tenure that began when he joined the state's highest tribunal on January 10, 1983, as only its second black member.

Shaw was one of several talented judges who led the Florida state courts system out of its murky, discriminatory past and toward the Twenty-First Century. It was not an easy time, least of all for leaders like him.

In conversations through the years, Shaw told of the place he came from and of the promised land he saw just over the next mountaintop.

He became a lawyer in 1960 during the days when Florida still was segregated by law. When Shaw took the Bar exam at Miami's Hotel DuPont, he could not stay in the hotel rooms like the other Bar applicants. The DuPont was "whites only."

Shaw became one of just 25 practicing African-American lawyers in Florida after he passed the exam. Joining other civil rights leaders, he took legal cases few other lawyers would accept, challenging segregation laws and representing clients arrested at civil rights demonstrations.

When he came to Florida small-town courts to help his clients, crowds often formed to stare. Shaw once explained that many people in those days could not believe there was such a thing as a black lawyer.

He always said he never let the injustices of those times bring him down. Shaw knew that bitterness weighs too heavily on the soul.

“You expect the system to drag its feet,” Shaw said in 1990. “It is more like a chess game -- move, counter move. And I remained optimistic through it because one of the ways to change things was through the courts.”

Shaw died at his Leon County home in December 2015. Under longstanding Florida Supreme Court custom, his body lay in state in the Court's rotunda on December 21, 2015, a few days later.

There were many tears in the rotunda that day. But there was also a sense of glory. Chief Justice Leander Shaw had been to the mountaintop. And he had seen the promised land. www.floridasupremecourt.org