Curtis L. Collier was studying chemistry when a summer job helped point him toward law. In an American Inns of Court interview, he recalled working in a Procter & Gamble laboratory and learning about the company's legal department.
He was born in Marianna, Arkansas, in 1949, the third of eight children, into what he described as poverty and segregation. The Black neighborhoods in his town had dirt roads while the white neighborhoods were paved, and the jobs open to Black workers were menial except for teaching and funeral work. He began laboring in the cotton fields at about age ten, carrying water to the adults working the rows. The public library was off limits to him, but he read what he could find, including biographies of Frank Lloyd Wright and Marie Curie, and he graduated from high school as valedictorian.
Collier completed his chemistry degree at Tennessee State University in 1971 and went on to Duke Law School. He entered the Air Force in 1974 as a captain in the Judge Advocate General's Corps, serving two years at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia and then in the Philippines, before leaving active duty in 1979. He joined the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana that year and moved to Chattanooga in 1987, where he supervised federal prosecutors and taught trial advocacy. "If someone had told anyone in our community, whether black or white, in the entire state of Arkansas, that this young black boy was going to be an officer of the United States military and assistant United States attorney, federal prosecutor, or United States District judge, they would've laughed at you," he told a Chattanooga television station in 2023.
In 1995, he became the first Black federal judge in the Eastern District of Tennessee. As chief judge from 2005 to 2012, he led the district court, and he later took senior status and continued hearing cases. He helped found Chattanooga's Brock-Cooper American Inn of Court, an organization where judges and lawyers meet to sharpen courtroom skills and professional conduct. His suggestion for new members was practical: give them cards spelling out expectations of professionalism, respect and courtesy. In 2015, he received the Sixth Circuit's American Inns of Court Professionalism Award.
