Possible Supreme Court pick championed black history museum

WASHINGTON (AP) — To remind him of some of the work done by potential Supreme Court nominee Robert L. Wilkins, all President Barack Obama has to do is look down the street from the White House to the nearly completed National Museum of African American History and Culture.

A native of Muncie, Indiana, who was raised by a single mother, he graduated from Harvard Law School and spent a decade as a public defender in Washington.

The class-action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union came about after Wilkins and three family members were stopped by a Maryland State Police trooper in 1992 while driving back from his grandfather's funeral and detained for a search by a drug-sniffing dog.

Republican resistance so infuriated Democrats that they exercised what's termed the "nuclear option," engineering the Senate rules so that only 51, rather than 60, votes were needed to act on the nominations.