Civil Rights Era Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach Has Died

Former Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, who stared down George Wallace on the steps of the University of Alabama and battled J. Edgar Hoover for wiretapping Martin Luther King, Jr., died Tuesday night at the age of 90. Though he led the Department of Justice during what may have been the greatest turning point for justice in the history of the United States, Katzenbach will probably best be remembered for lending his name to Katzenbach v. McClung, the seminal Supreme Court case that upheld the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters after it was challenged on a similar theory to the one attacking the Affordable Care Act today. Turns out, conservatives thought that law was unconstitutional as well.