Knoxville, 1904 – Filadélfia (EUA), 1976

Marcel Gomes

One of the protagonists in the fight for civil rights in the United States and the first Black person to govern the U.S. Virgin Islands, an American territory in the Caribbean where 78% of the population is descended from enslaved people. Hastie was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, at a time when Black people had designated seats on buses, and many restaurants, hotels, and stores would not even serve them. He earned a doctorate in law from Harvard University. In 1933, he accepted an invitation to work at the Department of the Interior. He helped draft the Organic Act, approved in 1936 by the U.S. Congress, which recognized the inhabitants of the islands as American citizens.

In 1937, he became the first Black judge appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt to serve on a Federal Court, precisely in the Virgin Islands. He returned to the mainland two years later to teach at Howard University. Beginning in 1941, during World War II, he worked in the War Department as a civilian aide but resigned in 1943 in protest against the segregation faced by soldiers of his ethnicity. In 1946, President Harry Truman appointed him governor of the Virgin Islands. He served until 1949, when he took a seat on the Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, where he remained until his retirement.