Gideon T. Carter III Oral History

Born and raised in Louisiana, Gideon T. Carter III has devoted his legal career to school desegregation. He has collaborated with LDF on two long-running cases to ensure equal educational opportunities for Black students in Louisiana. As a cooperating attorney in Thomas v. St. Martin Parish School Board, originally filed in 1965, Carter contributed to a new school assignment plan designed to desegregate the parish’s schools. In 2016, he filed a brief alongside LDF lawyers in Banks v. St. James Parish School Board, asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to block a charter school’s motion to open a racially segregated elementary school in the St. James Parish School District. Both cases were ongoing decades after they began.