James F. Byrnes

James Francis Byrnes was born on May 2, 1882, in Charleston, South Carolina, and died on April 9, 1972, and is the only person to have served in both houses of Congress, as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, as a state governor and in a cabinet post. Roosevelt appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1941, but at just one year and eighty seven days his tenure was the shortest of any justice in history, since Roosevelt soon asked him to leave the bench and lead the Office of Economic Stabilization and Office of War Mobilization after the United States entered the Second World War; he was also the last justice never to have earned a law degree. After Roosevelts death he became President Trumans secretary of state, attending the Potsdam Conference and the Paris Peace Conference before resigning from the cabinet in 1947, and he later returned to elected office as governor of South Carolina, where he opposed the Supreme Courts Brown v. Board of Education decision and sought to preserve segregated schools under a separate but equal framework.