Robert M. Bell

Robert Mack Bell (born July 6, 1943) is an American lawyer and jurist from Baltimore, Maryland. From 1996 to 2013, he served as Chief Judge on the Maryland Court of Appeals, now known as the Supreme Court of Maryland, the state's highest appellate court. He was the first African American to hold the position. At 16 years old, Bell was the lead plaintiff in Bell v. Maryland, a case that ultimately helped push the U.S. toward desegregation. Bell served as a judge at every level of the Maryland court system; and on July 6, 2013, reached the state's mandatory retirement age of 70 years for appellate and circuit court judges. Background Born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Bell's mother, a sharecropper, moved him and his two brothers to East Baltimore when he was one and a half years old. He attended Dunbar High School with classmate and friend Reginald F. Lewis. As a 16-year-old, he and a group of students participated in a sit-in to protest racial segregation at a local restaurant. On June 17, 1960, the group of 12 students entered Hooper's Restaurant, formerly located at Charles and Fayette Streets in downtown Baltimore, where they were refused service and asked to leave. The students, including Bell, refused. He and the other students were arrested and convicted in the Circuit Court of Baltimore City for criminal trespassing, and fined $10. The NAACP hired a team of lawyers, including Thurgood Marshall and Juanita Jackson Mitchell, to represent the students and appeal the conviction to the Maryland Court of Appeals. The appellants argued that the use of the state's trespassing laws to support segregation of public accommodations violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In 1962, the Court of Appeals upheld the decision of the circuit court.