We should all be thankful that John H. "Jack" Ruffin Jr. disobeyed his mother.

He wanted to become a lawyer, and she wanted him to become a schoolteacher because she feared for his safety as an attorney in the deep South.

Ruffin took the risk anyway, and it was worth it. During his long and distinguished career, he helped integrate two Georgia school systems and became the first African American chief judge of the Georgia Court of Appeals.

Ruffin, 75, died last week after collapsing in his Atlanta Home. He leaves behind a powerful legacy of fighting racial injustice.

According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

Mr. Ruffin did have some close scrapes. On one occasion, he found himself jailed for contempt in Waycross after a contentious cross-examination of then-Sheriff Robert E. Lee, who told Mr. Ruffin to stop pointing his finger at him. After Mr. Ruffin won an acquittal for a black client who was accused of raping and killing a white woman, a Hart County judge ordered a deputy to escort the lawyer until he was safely across the county line. Three years into his legal career, Mr. Ruffin shook up Augusta's white establishment by filing suit to desegregate the Richmond County school system. He doggedly pursued the litigation for decades against a defiant school system and hostile judges before finally obtaining a federal court order to integrate the system.

Ruffin believed that something was wrong with the system and fought for decades to improve it. It was an unpopular fight that was filled with peaks and valleys and probably did not earn him many friends, but one he doggedly pursued nonetheless.
And Ruffin didn't believe in double standards. When he sued to integrate the schools in his home county, his own mother, who had remarried, refused to send her kids to the white schools. Ruffin threatened to file a contempt order against his own mother (Yes, he did!).

"I just didn't think I could ask other parents to make that kind of sacrifice and exempt by own," he said in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in December 2008.

His mother relented, but it shows a kind of commitment to integrity and fairness that is often lacking in today's society.

"I hope I've been a good judge," Ruffin said during the December 2008 interview with the Atlanta Journal Constitution. "I always knew what kind of judge I didn't want to be. As a lawyer, I appeared before so many I felt were not deserving to wear the robe."

Over a lifetime, Ruffin more than proved himself worthy to don that long black robe.