The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people
#4501
Marc Raibert
#4508
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Marc Raibert is the Executive Director of the Boston Dynamics AI Institute, a Hyundai Motor Group organization that is focused on solving the most important problems in robotics and artificial intelligence to achieve fundamental advances in the engineering and science of robotics. Raibert was the founder, former CEO, and now Chairman of Boston Dynamics, a robotics company known for creating BigDog, Atlas, Spot, and Handle.
Go to Profile#4502
Thomas M. Disch
#4509
Overall Influence
1940 - 2008 (68 years)
Thomas Michael Disch was an American science fiction writer and poet. He won the Hugo Award for Best Related Book – previously called "Best Non-Fiction Book" – in 1999, and he had two other Hugo nominations and nine Nebula Award nominations to his credit, plus one win of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, a Rhysling Award, and two Seiun Awards, among others.
Go to Profile#4503
Anton Siluanov
#4510
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Anton Germanovich Siluanov is a Russian politician and economist. He has the federal state civilian service rank of 1st class Active State Councillor of the Russian Federation. In 2011, he was appointed Minister of Finance by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin substituting in this position Alexei Kudrin, who was forced out and dismissed by president Dmitry Medvedev after publicly criticizing the additional defense spending of 2.1 trillion rubles through 2014. Siluanov served as First Deputy Prime Minister of Russia from 2018 to 2020.
Go to Profile#4504
Jacques Dixmier
#4511
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (102 years)
Jacques Dixmier is a French mathematician. He worked on operator algebras, especially C*-algebras, and wrote several of the standard reference books on them, and introduced the Dixmier trace and the Dixmier mapping.
Go to Profile#4505
Vanna White
#4512
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Vanna Marie White is an American television personality and game-show hostess, best known as the co-host of the game show Wheel of Fortune, a position she has held since 1982. She began her career as a model while studying fashion, competing in Miss Georgia USA in 1978. In addition to her work on Wheel of Fortune, she has played minor characters or appeared as herself in many films and television series, and is the author of the 1987 autobiography Vanna Speaks. She also participates in real-estate investment, owns the yarn brand Vanna's Choice, and is a patron of St. Jude Children's Research ...
Go to Profile#4506
Anthea Bell
#4513
Overall Influence
1936 - 2018 (82 years)
Anthea Bell was an English translator of literary works, including children's literature, from French, German and Danish. These include The Castle by Franz Kafka, Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, the Inkworld trilogy by Cornelia Funke and the French Asterix comics with co-translator Derek Hockridge.
Go to Profile#4507
Benjamin Zephaniah
#4514
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah is a British writer and dub poet. He was included in The Times list of Britain's top 50 post-war writers in 2008. Early life and education Zephaniah was born and raised in the Handsworth district of Birmingham, England, which he has called the "Jamaican capital of Europe". He is the son of a Barbadian postman and a Jamaican nurse. A dyslexic, he attended an approved school but left aged 13 unable to read or write. During his childhood he was given an old, manual typewriter which he says inspired him to become a writer. It is now in the collection of Birmingham...
Go to Profile#4508
Michael Rosbash
#4515
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Michael Morris Rosbash is an American geneticist and chronobiologist. Rosbash is a professor and researcher at Brandeis University and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Rosbash's research group cloned the Drosophila period gene in 1984 and proposed the Transcription Translation Negative Feedback Loop for circadian clocks in 1990. In 1998, they discovered the cycle gene, clock gene, and cryptochrome photoreceptor in Drosophila through the use of forward genetics, by first identifying the phenotype of a mutant and then determining the genetics behind the mutation. Rosbash was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003.
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Christopher Fry
#4516
Overall Influence
1907 - 2005 (98 years)
Christopher Fry was an English poet and playwright. He is best known for his verse dramas, especially The Lady's Not for Burning, which made him a major force in theatre in the 1940s and 1950s. Biography
Go to Profile#4510
Brian Wilson
#4517
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Brian Douglas Wilson is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer who co-founded <!-- DO NOT CAPITALIZE -->the Beach Boys. Often called a genius for his novel approaches to pop composition, extraordinary musical aptitude, and mastery of recording techniques, he is widely acknowledged as one of the most innovative and significant songwriters of the 20th century. His best-known work is distinguished for its high production values, complex harmonies and orchestrations, layered vocals, and introspective or ingenuous themes. Wilson is also known for his formerly high-ranged sin...
Go to Profile#4511
Nimrod Megiddo
#4518
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Nimrod Megiddo is a mathematician and computer scientist. He is a research scientist at the IBM Almaden Research Center and Stanford University. His interests include combinatorial optimization, algorithm design and analysis, game theory, and machine learning. He was one of the first people to propose a solution to the bounding sphere and smallest-circle problem.
Go to Profile#4512
Brendan Gill
#4519
Overall Influence
1914 - 1997 (83 years)
Brendan Gill was an American journalist. He wrote for The New Yorker for more than 60 years. Gill also contributed film criticism for Film Comment, wrote about design and architecture for Architectural Digest and wrote fifteen books, including a popular book about his time at the New Yorker magazine.
Go to Profile#4513
Timbaland
#4520
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Timothy Zachery Mosley , known professionally as Timbaland, is an American record producer. He has received widespread acclaim for his innovative production work and distinctive "stuttering" rhythmic style. In 2007, Entertainment Weekly stated that "just about every current pop trend can be traced back to him—from sultry, urban-edged R&B songstresses [...] to the art of incorporating avant-garde sounds into No. 1 hits."
Go to Profile#4514
Edward Schillebeeckx
#4521
Overall Influence
1914 - 2009 (95 years)
Edward Cornelis Florentius Alfonsus Schillebeeckx was a Belgian Catholic theologian born in Antwerp. He taught at the Catholic University in Nijmegen. He was a member of the Dominican Order. His books on theology have been translated into many languages, and his contributions to the Second Vatican Council made him known throughout the world.
Go to Profile#4515
Kojin Karatani
#4522
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Kōjin Karatani is a Japanese philosopher and literary critic. Biography Karatani entered the University of Tokyo in 1960, where he joined the radical Marxist Communist League, better known as "The Bund," and participated in the massive 1960 Anpo protests against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, which he would later come to view as a formative political experience.
Go to Profile#4516
Tom Knight
#4523
Overall Influence
Tom Knight is a synthetic biologist and computer engineer for his company, Ginkgo Bioworks. He began his studies at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology at the tender age of 14, taking advantage of the school’s close proximity to his home. With a background in computer programming and organic chemistry, he has made a number of important contributions to computer science. His work featured prominently in the creation of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. He wrote the original kernel for ITS operating system and designed one of the earliest semiconductor memory-based bitmap displays.
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Christopher Browning
#4524
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Christopher Robert Browning is an American historian and is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . A specialist on the Holocaust, Browning is known for his work documenting the Final Solution, the behavior of those implementing Nazi policies, and the use of survivor testimony. He is the author of nine books, including Ordinary Men and The Origins of the Final Solution .
Go to Profile#4518
Stephan Kinsella
#4525
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Norman Stephan Kinsella is an American intellectual property lawyer, author, and deontological anarcho-capitalist. His legal works have been published by Oxford University Press, Oceana Publications, Mises Institute, Quid Pro Books and others.
Go to Profile#4519
Morton White
#4526
Overall Influence
1917 - 2016 (99 years)
Morton White was an American philosopher and historian of ideas. He was a proponent of a doctrine he called holistic pragmatism and also a noted scholar of American intellectual history. He was a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard from 1953 to 1970. He was Professor Emeritus in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, where he served as Professor in the School of Historical Studies from 1970 until he retired in 1987.
Go to Profile#4520
Nicanor Parra
#4527
Overall Influence
1914 - 2018 (104 years)
Nicanor Segundo Parra Sandoval was a Chilean poet and physicist. He was considered one of the most influential Chilean poets of the Spanish language in the 20th century, often compared with Pablo Neruda. Parra described himself as an "anti-poet," due to his distaste for standard poetic pomp and function; after recitations he would exclaim "Me retracto de todo lo dicho" .
Go to Profile#4521
Sal Restivo
#4528
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Sal Restivo is a sociologist/anthropologist. Work Restivo is a leading contributor to science studies and in particular to the sociology of mathematics. His current work focuses on the sociology of mind and brain, and the sociology of god and religion. He has also done work in the sociology of social and sociable robotics. He helped launch the ethnographic study of science in the 1970s, and is a founding member and former president of the Society for Social Studies of Science. He was a founding member of the Association for Humanist Sociology, and was also involved with Science for the Peo...
Go to Profile#4522
E. L. James
#4529
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Erika Mitchell , known by her pen name E. L. James, is a British author. She wrote the best-selling erotic romance trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Freed, along with the companion novels Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian, Darker: Fifty Shades Darker as Told by Christian, and Freed: Fifty Shades Freed as Told by Christian. Prior to this, she wrote the Twilight fan fiction "Master of the Universe" that served as the basis for the Fifty Shades trilogy under the web name Snowqueens Icedragon. In 2019 she published her first book unconnected with the...
Go to Profile#4523
Caro Lucas
#4530
Overall Influence
1949 - 2010 (61 years)
Caro Lucas Ghukasian ; was an Iranian Armenian scientist. His many areas of contribution to Iranian scientific society include biological computing, computational intelligence, uncertain systems, intelligent control, fuzzy systems, neural networks, multiagent systems, swarm intelligence, data mining, business intelligence, financial modeling, knowledge management, systems science, and general design theory. He was honored as an Eternal Figure by the Iranian Science and Culture Hall of Fame, which is a distinguishing honor offered to prominent Iranian chancellor scholars..
Go to Profile#4524
Anthony Julius
#4531
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Anthony Robert Julius is a British solicitor advocate known for being Diana, Princess of Wales' divorce lawyer and for representing Deborah Lipstadt. He is a partner at the law firm Mishcon de Reya.
Go to Profile#4525
Gregory Nagy
#4532
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Gregory Nagy is an American professor of Classics at Harvard University, specializing in Homer and archaic Greek poetry. Nagy is known for extending Milman Parry and Albert Lord's theories about the oral composition-in-performance of the Iliad and Odyssey.
Go to Profile#4526
Jeff Beck
#4533
Overall Influence
1944 - 2023 (79 years)
Geoffrey Arnold Beck was an English guitarist. He rose to prominence as a member of the rock band the Yardbirds, and afterwards founded and fronted the Jeff Beck Group and Beck, Bogert & Appice. In 1975, he switched to an instrumental style with focus on an innovative sound, and his releases spanned genres and styles ranging from blues rock, hard rock, jazz fusion and a blend of guitar-rock and electronica.
Go to Profile#4527
Anthony Zee
#4534
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Anthony Zee is a Chinese-American physicist, writer, and a professor at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and the physics department of the University of California, Santa Barbara. After graduating from Princeton University, Zee obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 1970, supervised by Sidney Coleman. During 1970–72 and 1977–78, he was at the Institute for Advanced Study. From 1973 to 1978, he was an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. In his first year as assistant professor at Princeton, Zee had Ed Witten as his teaching assistant and grader.
Go to Profile#4528
Clifford Cocks
#4535
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Clifford Christopher Cocks is a British mathematician and cryptographer. In the early 1970s, while working at the United Kingdom Government Communications Headquarters , he developed an early public-key cryptography system. This predated commercial offerings, but due the classified nature of Cocks' work, it did not become widely known until 1997 when the work was declassified.
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Peter Safar
#4536
Overall Influence
1924 - 2003 (79 years)
Peter Safar was an Austrian anesthesiologist of Czech descent. He is credited with pioneering cardiopulmonary resuscitation . Early life Safar was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1924 into a medical family. His father, Karl, was an ophthalmologist and his mother, Vinca , who had a Jewish grandmother, was a pediatrician. He graduated from the University of Vienna in 1948. He married Eva Kyzivat and moved from Vienna to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1949 for surgical training at Yale University. He completed training in anesthesiology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1952. That same year he worked in Lima, Peru, and founded that country's first academic anesthesiology department.
Go to Profile#4530
Richard L. Rubenstein
#4537
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
Richard Lowell Rubenstein was a theologian, educator, and writer, noted particularly for his path-breaking contributions to post-Holocaust theology and his socio-political analyses of surplus populations and bureaucracy. A Connecticut resident, he was married to art historian Betty Rogers Rubenstein .
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Marjorie Perloff
#4538
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Marjorie Perloff is an Austrian-born poetry scholar and critic in the United States. Early life Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna. The annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany exacerbated Viennese anti-Semitism, and so the family emigrated in 1938, when she was six-and-a-half, going first to Zürich and then to the United States, settling in Riverdale, New York. After attending Oberlin College from 1949 to 1952, she graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Barnard College in 1953; that year, she married Joseph K. Perloff, a cardiologist focused on congenital heart disease.
Go to Profile#4532
Diego Gambetta
#4539
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Diego Gambetta is an Italian-born social scientist. He is a professor of social theory at the European University Institute in Florence, a Carlo Alberto Chair at the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, and an official fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. He is well known for his vivid and unconventional applications of economic theory and a rational choice theory approach to understanding a variety of social phenomena. He has made important analytical contributions to the concept of trust by using game theory and signalling theory.
Go to Profile#4533
John Comaroff
#4540
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
John Comaroff is the Hugh K. Foster Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, and Oppenheimer Research Fellow in African Studies at Harvard University. Comaroff also serves as a research professor at the American Bar Foundation. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Cape Town and his doctorate from the London School of Economics. Comaroff has held numerous influential teaching positions, includng the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago as well as positions at Duke University, Tel Aviv University, and University of Wales.
Go to Profile#4534
Ira Shor
#4541
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Ira Shor is a professor at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, where he teaches composition and rhetoric. He is also doctoral faculty in the PhD Program in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Go to Profile#4535
Mark Fisher
#4542
Overall Influence
1968 - 2017 (49 years)
Mark Fisher , also known under his blogging alias k-punk, was an English writer, music critic, political and cultural theorist, philosopher, and teacher based in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He initially achieved acclaim for his blogging as k-punk in the early 2000s, and was known for his writing on radical politics, music, and popular culture.
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Richard Epstein
#4543
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Richard Allen Epstein is an American legal scholar known for his writings on torts, contracts, property rights, law and economics, classical liberalism, and libertarianism. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at New York University and the director of the Classical Liberal Institute. He also serves as the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law emeritus and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.
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Barbara Morgan
#4544
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Barbara Radding Morgan is an American teacher and a former NASA astronaut. She participated in the Teacher in Space program as backup to Christa McAuliffe for the 1986 ill-fated STS-51-L mission of the Space Shuttle Challenger. She then trained as a mission specialist, and flew on STS-118 in August 2007. She is the first teacher to have been to space.
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Timnit Gebru
#4545
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Timnit Gebru is an Eritrean Ethiopian-born political activist and computer scientist who works on algorithmic bias and data mining. She is an advocate for diversity in technology and co-founder of Black in AI, a community of Black researchers working in artificial intelligence . She is the founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute .
Go to Profile#4539
Tim Bray
#4546
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Timothy William Bray is a Canadian software developer, environmentalist, political activist and one of the co-authors of the original XML specification. He worked for Amazon Web Services from December 2014 until May 2020 when he quit due to concerns over the terminating of whistleblowers. Previously he has been employed by Google, Sun Microsystems and Digital Equipment Corporation . Bray has also founded or co-founded several start-ups such as Antarctica Systems.
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Samir Geagea
#4547
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Samir Farid Geagea is a Lebanese politician and former militia commander who has been leading the Lebanese Forces party and dissolved militia since 1986. Born in Ain al-Remaneh in Beirut with origins from Bsharri, Geagea joined the Kataeb Party in his early years. He led the Northern Front in the Lebanese Forces from 1979 to 1984. In March 1985, after the deterioration of the Christian political situation in the eastern regions after the assassination of the Lebanese Forces leader Bachir Gemayel, he led, jointly with Elie Hobeika and Karim Pakradouni, an uprising that led to control of the political situation without any bloodshed.
Go to Profile#4541
Alfonso Caycedo
#4548
Overall Influence
1932 - 2017 (85 years)
Alfonso Caycedo is the Founder of Sophrology, a form of self-development. Caycedo also founded Sofrocay, the International Caycedian Sophrology Academy based in Andorra, where his Caycedian methods are practiced.
Go to Profile#4542
Paul Ormerod
#4549
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Paul Andrew Ormerod is a British economist who is a partner at Volterra Partners consultancy. Additionally, he is a visiting professor at UCL Centre for Decision Making Uncertainty. Research Ormerod has researched complexity, complex systems, nonlinear feedback, the boom and bust cycle of business and economic competition. He uses a multidisciplinary approach, making use of biology, physics, mathematics, statistics and psychology as sources of results that can be applied to economics.
Go to Profile#4543
Peter Berkowitz
#4550
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Peter Berkowitz is an American political scientist, former law professor, and United States Department of State employee, most recently serving as the Director of Policy Planning at the United States Department of State. He currently serves as the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
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Cynthia Lennon
#4551
Overall Influence
1939 - 2015 (76 years)
Cynthia Lennon was the first wife of John Lennon and the mother of Julian Lennon. Born in Blackpool and raised in Hoylake on the Wirral Peninsula, she attended the Liverpool College of Art where Lennon was also a student. Powell and Lennon started a relationship after meeting in a calligraphy class. When Lennon was performing in Hamburg with the Beatles, Powell rented his bedroom at 251 Menlove Avenue in the Liverpool suburb of Woolton from his aunt and legal guardian, Mimi Smith. After Powell became pregnant, she and Lennon married in August 1962, and the couple lived at Kenwood in Weybridge from 1964 to 1968, where she kept house and participated with Lennon in a London-based social life.
Go to Profile#4545
Mahmoud Abbas
#4552
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Mahmoud Abbas , also known by the kunya Abu Mazen , is the president of the State of Palestine and the Palestinian National Authority . He has been the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization since 2004, PNA president since January 2005, and State of Palestine president since May 2005. Abbas is also a member of the Fatah party and was elected chairman in 2009.
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Julian Baggini
#4553
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Julian Baggini is a philosopher, journalist and the author of over 20 books about philosophy written for a general audience. He is co-founder of The Philosophers' Magazine and has written for numerous international newspapers and magazines. In addition to writing on the subject of philosophy he has also written books on atheism, secularism and the nature of national identity. He is a patron of Humanists UK.
Go to Profile#4547
Ronaldinho
#4554
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Ronaldo de Assis Moreira , commonly known as Ronaldinho Gaúcho or simply Ronaldinho, is a Brazilian retired professional footballer who played mostly as an attacking midfielder, but was also deployed as a winger. Widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time, he won two FIFA World Player of the Year awards and a Ballon d'Or. He is the only player ever to have won a World Cup, a Copa América, a Confederations Cup, a Champions League, a Copa Libertadores and a Ballon d'Or. A global icon of the sport, Ronaldinho was renowned for his technical skills, creativity, dribbling ability an...
Go to Profile#4548
Peter Trudgill
#4555
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Peter Trudgill, FBA is an English sociolinguist, academic and author. Trudgill was born in Norwich, England and grew up in the area of Thorpe St Andrew. He attended the City of Norwich School from 1955. Trudgill studied modern languages at King's College, Cambridge and obtained a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1971.
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Steven Hassan
#4556
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Steven Alan Hassan is an American author and mental health counselor who specializes in the area of cults and New Religious Movements. He worked as a deprogrammer in the late 1970s, but since then has advocated a non-coercive form of exit counseling.
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Dennis Archer
#4557
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Dennis Wayne Archer is an American lawyer, jurist and former politician from Michigan. A Democrat, Archer served as Justice on the Michigan Supreme Court and as mayor of Detroit. He later served as president of the American Bar Association, becoming the first black president of the organization, which, until 1943, had barred African-American lawyers from membership.
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