George Bundy Smith, who in 1992 became the third Black person to ever serve on the New York Court of Appeals, was attending Yale Law School and staring down the barrel of exams when Yale Chaplain Dr. William Sloane Coffin Jr. issued a call for students to assist with the Freedom Rides in the early 1960s.
According to an essay published by the Historical Society of New York Courts, Smith kept hitting the books while taking part in the rides, which were undertaken to challenge the lack of enforcement of then-recent rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court to desegregate interstate bus travel.
