On a sunny afternoon in Harlem, judges, political figures and community organizers gathered to present the late Franklin H. Williams with a gift for his 108th birthday: the dedication of a street corner just outside the housing complex where he spent much of his life — one built in response to segregation he'd help to dismantle in his storied career as a civil rights attorney and diplomat.

Williams, a native New Yorker and 1945 graduate of Fordham University’s law school, served as assistant counsel to Thurgood Marshall and later as the NAACP’s West Coast regional director, contributing to major advancements in school desegregation and restrictive covenants, including fighting against the systematic exclusion of Black jurors decades before the practice was formally ended in the 1986 U.S.

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