Careerists: Civil War to civil rights

African-American attorneys of Arkansas

February 27, 2001
Web posted at: 5:49 p.m. EST (2249 GMT)

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By Michele Dula Baum
CNN.com Writer

(CNN) - Long before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of his dream on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, African-American lawyers were working legal fields to pursue racial justice in the shadow of Lincoln's war.

An examination of these attorneys -- "(Extra)Ordinary Men: African-American Lawyers and Civil Rights in Arkansas Before 1950" -- begins to explore the contributions of some 70 black lawyers practicing in the state from the end of the Civil War to the dawn of the country's civil-rights era. Published in the November 2000 Arkansas Law Review -- a publication of the University of Arkansas School of Law -- the 50-plus page paper was written by associate law professor Judith Kilpatrick.

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	Circumstances play a role in whether each of us has a chance at "larger courage" -- the type many of these Arkansas African-American attorneys must have had. But were the circumstances right and you had a chance at a career of courage, could you rise to the occasion? I like to think I could. I look for chances in my daily work now to make stronger and better choices when I can. I just can't tell. Without the circumstances in place, I can only speculate. Sorry to say, I'm just not sure I could hack it. I respect this kind of courage in others, but I sometimes doubt I'd make a choice for it, if leading a safer, less challenging life and career was available. View Results

Researching the project was "a fascinating process," says Kilpatrick, whose interest was sparked while she looked for material for a still-unfinished biography of the late civil-rights lawyer Wiley Branton Sr. of Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

"The big surprises were how many there were, and how far back they went," says Kilpatrick, who says her own ethnic background is half-Native American. "In learning about the names of the lawyers, I started thinking about what it must have been like."

In a word, it was hard.

"The heyday was Reconstruction, really," Kilpatrick says. "And then, starting about 1890, Arkansas imposed statutes that forced black people out of public office and made it impossible to vote -- Jim Crow laws -- and I just started to be amazed."

The professor says she was surprised not only by the tales of tenacity and perseverance against an increasingly exclusive establishment, but also by the supreme ordinariness that she found went along with the orneriness.

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"It was just a wonderful mystery in many respects," says Kilpatrick, who scoured old telephone books and city directories and haunted historical archives in Arkansas and Washington to discover as much as possible about black lawyers of the era.

"It was understandable that you'd get African-Americans who were ambitious becoming lawyers when it was easier (during Reconstruction), although it never was easy, she says. "There was always violence and discrimination. But, at least when the Republicans were in power, there were some protections."

Even after Arkansas Democrats began erecting barriers -- lawyers had to be admitted to the state bar, for example -- black attorneys carried on.

Among the notable personalities Kilpatrick researched was Scipio Africanus Jones, who was born into slavery and died in 1943 after a distinguished legal career. Named after a Roman general, Jones is primarily noted for his defense of 12 black men who in 1919 were convicted of murder after race-related violence in Phillips County, Arkansas.

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Black tenant farmers were holding a union meeting in a church in Elaine, Arkansas, when shots were fired just before dawn on October 1. After two days of violence, federal troops were sent in from Little Rock to quell the riots. Five white men were killed and estimates of the dead among blacks range from 20 to more than 800.

Although no whites were arrested, 143 blacks were taken into custody and 12 were convicted of first-degree murder "in about 20 minutes," according to Kilpatrick.

Jones -- whose father was a prominent white man -- worked with a firm of white lawyers to free the 12. The defense took place over a period of six years, with one case going as far as the Supreme Court of the United States. Jones, however, did not go to the nation's highest court.

"He didn't do much arguing of the case, but probably did a lot of the research," says Kilpatrick. "And then, for the Supreme Court, he even had his train ticket, but was told not to go. It must have been crushing."

In many Arkansas counties, "there was actually an unwritten rule" that a black lawyer could only appear before the bench when accompanied by a white attorney, the professor says. "It wasn't a statute. It was just something judges did."

Just after the Civil War, most black lawyers in Arkansas came from somewhere else, Kilpatrick found. Some were trained in prestigious schools such as the Boston College School of Law in Massachusetts and the University of Chicago in Illinois. Others took correspondence courses or apprenticed to practicing attorneys.

"Scipio Jones received his training through a firm of white lawyers," she says. "There is some speculation that his father had a lot to do with that."

While some rose high -- at least one became a state representative -- obstacles were frequent and pervasive.

"Toward the 1890s, you start seeing more lawyers who are homegrown," says Kilpatrick. "Still, for many years, they couldn't get training in the South."

For the most part, black attorneys were relegated to non-trial work. They prepared contracts, arranged adoptions and wills, filed lawsuits between black clients and did other office work.

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"African-American clients who could afford to pay a lawyer often would go to white lawyers," says the professor. And black lawyers only had white clients when they were appointed by the court to represent the indigent.

Still, efforts to improve the social atmosphere were ongoing, she adds.

Judith Kilpatrick

Twenty-seven black lawyers were admitted to the state bar between 1891 and 1923, a period defined by increasingly difficult race relations and strengthening segregation.

Initially, lawyers relied "almost entirely on political action" to achieve social equity, Kilpatrick says. But as Jim Crow became ascendant, vehicles for agitation included mass public demonstrations and formal legal action.

Later, as the African-American civil rights struggle began to take shape after World War II, attorneys increasingly used lawsuits to secure basic rights in Arkansas.

Branton became known as a figure in the case of the "Little Rock Nine," when nine black teen-agers were escorted by federal reserve troops to integrate Central High School in Little Rock.

In the succeeding decade, other figures would come to prominence in other states -- Thurgood Marshall, Vernon Jordan and Roy Wilkins among them.

"For an ordinary, small-town lawyer, he accomplished incredible things," Kilpatrick says of Branton. "He reached heights one wouldn't expect of an African-American lawyer -- or any lawyer coming from his background. And these days, no one knows it."

But in Branton's day, "Everybody knew him and he new everybody," she says.

Her biography is to include much about what happened after Branton left Arkansas in 1962 to become the first director of the Voter Education Project, which was headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.

But the research into his life sparked another book concerning those who came before Branton. Their times and trials. Their triumphs and tribulations.

"There's a lot of frustration that goes on with this kind of research," says Kilpatrick, noting that many records have been lost through fire, neglect and sometimes plain malice.

"I was helped by a couple of studies done around the turn of the century, including the biography of an Oklahoma lawyer," she says. "There are bits and pieces of materials."

From those bits, Kilpatrick says she hopes to piece together a new book.

Judith Kilpatrick asks that anyone with information that may contribute to her research contact her by e-mail at jkilpat@uark.edu

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University of Arkansas
National Bar Association
The Arkansas History Commission and State Archives
American Bar Association
Arkansas Resources for African-American Studies

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