Theodore R. Newman Jr. (born July 5, 1934) is a former judge of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. He served as the first black chief judge of the court. Newman was born in Birmingham and raised in Tuskegee, Alabama, where his father was a Methodist minister and his mother was a schoolteacher. He graduated from the Mount Herman School for Boys, a boarding school in Massachusetts, in 1951. He went on to earn a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Brown University in 1955 and a law degree from Harvard Law School in 1958. After law school he spent three years as a judge advocate in the United States Air Force stationed in France. On his return to the United States, he moved to Washington, D.C., to work at the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division from September 196