1938
Byron Whizzer White, January 1, 1938, Cotton Bowl.
University of Colorado.
Yale University.
1937
Justice Byron R. White in a 1937 photo taken when he played for the University of Colorado.
1938
Byron Whizzer White, January 1, 1938, Cotton Bowl.
1961
Byron White with Robert Kennedy.
1991
Byron White swearing in new Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, as wife Virginia Lamp Thomas looks on in 1991.
Byron White.
Byron R. White.
Byron Whizzer White.
Mr. White with other members of the Commission on Structural Alternatives for the Federal Courts of Appeals.
Portrait from the Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States (Artist Chris Owen).
University of Colorado.
Yale University.
judge lawyer military politician statesman athlete
Mr. White was born on June 8, 1917, in Fort Collins, Colorado, United States. He was the second son born to Alpha Albert White and Maude Burger White. In 1920 the family moved to the nearby town of Wellington, Colorado, where Albert White became the manager of a lumber company. The town’s chief economic livelihood centered on the sugar beet crop, and, as White would later recall, "Everybody worked for a living. Everybody. Everybody."
Whatever disadvantages Byron White experienced growing up in a small Colorado town during the depression did not hamper his educational attainments. He graduated first in his high school class in 1934 and earned a scholarship to the University of Colorado, where he demonstrated himself both an outstanding athlete and an extraordinary student. "Whizzer" White, as he came to be known at the university, became a star football player, was class president his senior year, graduated again number one in his class in 1938, and was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to study in Oxford, England. He did not set out immediately for Oxford on graduation, however. Instead, he agreed to play football for the Pittsburgh Pirates (now the Steelers) for one season for $15,000, the highest salary paid to a professional football player up to that time. Leading the NFL in rushing that season, White compiled a record that would make him better known among the public as a football player than as a Supreme Court justice.
By January 1939 he had left football behind to begin his study of law at Oxford. After a short time studying at Oxford, White returned to the United States in the fall of 1939 to enter Yale University Law School. He won the Edgar Cullen Award for receiving the highest grades of the freshman class. After the war Mr. White returned to Yale and finished the final year of law school, graduating in November 1946 magna cum laude.
Expecting to be drafted at any minute, Mr. White eventually put his law school plans on hold and accepted a contract to play football for the Detroit Lions in the 1940-1941 season. After attempting to join the Marines in the summer of 1941 and being rejected because of his colorblindness, Mr. White started another season with the Lions. During the season, which was to be his last, he applied for and was accepted by Naval Intelligence into the naval reserve. The attack on Pearl Harbor in December of that year soon launched White into the South Pacific, where he spent nearly four years as a Naval Intelligence officer. While serving in the navy, Byron White again encountered John F. Kennedy, recently returned after his P.T. boat had been sunk by a Japanese destroyer.
In 1946, Byron White immediately went to work for a year as a judicial clerk for the newly appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court, Fred M. Vinson. Afterward, he returned to Colorado and took a job with the law firm of Newton, Davis & Henry in Denver. For the next 14 years, White developed a business practice while he tried to avoid the notoriety of having been a star football player.
When Kennedy began his campaign for the presidency in 1959, Byron White organized local Colorado-for-Kennedy clubs and successfully gained the bulk of the state's delegate votes for his old friend at the 1960 Democratic convention. White helped Kennedy in his national campaign as well, and the new president named him deputy attorney general. Mr. White served capably, especially during the civil rights struggles in the South.
In March 1962, to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of Justice Charles E. Whittaker, Mr. Kennedy nominated White to the Supreme Court. Six months later Justice Felix Frankfurter also resigned, and the president called on Arthur J. Goldberg to fill that seat. The two new justices came on the Court at a tumultuous time. Under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren during the 1950 and 1960, the Supreme Court was leading the nation in an effort to improve the lot of dispossessed minorities and other disadvantaged groups. A majority of the justices embraced an activist role as civil rights confrontations, student anti-war protests, and other struggles shook America. A minority of the Court urged greater restraint. Mr. Goldberg aligned himself with the activists, and Byron White tended to side with the proponents of judicial self-restraint.
On March 19, 1993, Justice White informed President Bill Clinton that he would retire from the Court at the end of that term. Having been appointed by a Democratic administration, Byron White apparently believed it fitting that his replacement be secured by one. When he resigned from the Court on June 28, 1993, Democrats had their first opportunity to make a Supreme Court appointment since 1967. After retirement, White continued to hear cases on the federal courts of appeals.
Byron White was an American super football halfback and the twelfth longest-serving justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
The NFL Players Association gives the Byron "Whizzer" White NFL Man of the Year Award to one player each year for his charity work. White was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003 by President George W. Bush. White was inducted into the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference Hall of Fame on July 14, 2007, in addition to being a member of the College Football Hall of Fame and the University of Colorado's Athletic Hall of Fame, where he is enshrined as "The Greatest Buff Ever".
The federal courthouse in Denver that houses the Tenth Circuit is named after White.
Byron White was an adherent of Episcopalianism.
Along with his law practice, White was active in Democratic politics at the local level. He was a supporter of Kennedy. He did not adhere rigidly to any ideological position and often represented a vital swing vote in close decisions during his Court service. But on key issues, he tended to side with the conservatives. White opposed broad use of affirmative action, favored closer ties between church and state, and strongly sided with law enforcement officials on law-and-order issues.
Byron White was a frequent critic of the doctrine of "substantive due process". He criticized the Court's unprecedented expansion of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment" to strike down a California law providing for civil commitment of drug addicts. He argued that the Court was "imposing its own philosophical predilections" on the state in this exercise of judicial power, although its historic "allergy to substantive due process" would never permit it to strike down a state's economic regulatory law in such a manner.
Mr. White took a middle course on the issue of the death penalty: was not against the death penalty in all forms. White accepted the position that the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution required that all punishments be "proportional" to the crime. He also thought that imposing the death penalty on minors was constitutional, and a decision that declared that the death penalty as applied to offenders below 16 years of age was unconstitutional as a cruel and unusual punishment.
In questions concerning abortion, Byron White castigated that the U.S. Constitution "values the convenience, whim or caprice of the putative mother more than the life or potential life of the fetus." He consistently supported the attempts to fully desegregate public schools. He voted to uphold affirmative action remedies to racial inequality in an education setting. White was concerned about the potential far-reaching impact of holding private racial discrimination illegal, which if taken to its logical conclusion might ban many varied forms of voluntary self-segregation, including social and advocacy groups that limited their membership to African Americans.
Physical Characteristics:
Height: 6 ft 1 in (1.85 m)
Weight: 187 lb (85 kg)
Quotes from others about the person
Art Rooney: "Of all the athletes I have known in my lifetime, I'd have to say Whizzer White came as close to anyone to giving 100 percent of himself when he was in competition."
Byron White married Marion Lloyd Stearns on June 15, 1946; their family would eventually include a son, Charles, and a daughter, Nancy.
