He was driving home from his grandfather's funeral when the police pulled the car over and brought out a drug dog. They searched the family in the rain on the side of the road. Robert Wilkins happened to be a Harvard-trained lawyer. He is now a federal appeals judge. Interstate 68, Maryland, May 1992. Wilkins was 28 and a public defender in Washington. He was in a rented car with his aunt, his uncle and his cousin, driving back from a funeral in Chicago. A Maryland State Police trooper stopped them for speeding. Then the trooper asked to search the car. Wilkins, who did this for a living, said no and asked why. He was told that if he refused, they would wait for a drug dog. They waited. The dog came. The family stood on the shoulder in the rain while a dog went round the car. They found nothing, because there was nothing. And then Wilkins did what almost nobody is equipped to do. He sued. In discovery, his lawyers obtained a Maryland State Police intelligence document that described the profile of drug couriers on that corridor in explicitly racial terms. It was in writing. It was a state document. The case settled in 1995. The terms included something unusual and important: Maryland agreed to record the race of every driver stopped and searched on its highways, and to hand the data over. That data became the statistical foundation of what the whole country now calls racial profiling. The phrase "driving while Black" entered American English through cases like this one. Barack Obama appointed him to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2014. The man they made stand in the rain beside a rented car now sits on one of the most powerful courts in America. His story is one of many that deserve to be remembered. Get our book and uncover the histories too often left out of the record savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…