Damon Keith, a federal judge in the Midwest whose rulings championed equality and civil rights, notably in a landmark Supreme Court decision striking down Nixon administration wiretapping in domestic security cases without a court order, died on Sunday in Detroit. He was 96.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Debbie Keith.

In one of the federal judiciary’s longest and most prolific careers, Judge Keith, a Democrat, was a fountainhead of regional rulings with national implications. He attacked racial segregation in education, housing and employment; conservative efforts to limit African-American voting; and, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, secret hearings to deport hundreds of immigrants deemed suspicious.

Judge Keith’s tenure spanned more than a half-century, first as President Lyndon B. Johnson’s choice for a district court judgeship in Detroit, with jurisdiction in Eastern Michigan (1967-1977), then as President Jimmy Carter’s selection for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, presiding in Cincinnati over cases arising in Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan and Tennessee.

In a blistering 2016 dissent in an Ohio case that restricted early and absentee voting, Judge Keith accused two Circuit Court colleagues of scorning African-American voters and the memory of black people slain in the struggle for voting rights. In a frankly emotional rebuke, he incorporated into his opinion photographs and biographies of 36 such victims, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.