Who Was the First African-American Lawyer in Texas?

It began innocently enough with an early 2014 article in the Texas Bar Journal about legal trailblazers in Texas—the first Latino admitted to the bar, the first Asian-American judge, etc. My curiosity was piqued by the fact that one question was conspicuously unanswered: Who was the first African-American lawyer in Texas? As an amateur legal historian, I turned for advice from someone who herself has made history—Chief Justice Carolyn Wright of the Dallas Court of Appeals, the first African-American woman elected to an intermediate appellate court in Texas as well as the first to serve as its chief justice. Chief Justice Wright and I shared a keen interest in exploring people and events that history books had overlooked. A Howard Law alumna, she recommended starting with the work of former Howard University School of Law dean J. Clay Smith Jr., who had written a seminal book about the history of black lawyers in America.

Although Smith’s brief chapter on Texas was a useful start, even this author readily admitted that the issue of who was Texas’ first African-American attorney was “muddled” and “uncertain.” There were many factors that complicated our search. The State Bar archives and Supreme Court of Texas archives would be little help, in part because records were not kept along racial lines and because of the nature of the legal profession in Texas in the late 1800s. There was no state bar until 1939, no bar exam until 1903 and no bar licensing statute until 1891. When the first African-American lawyers began appearing in Texas during Reconstruction, the path to becoming a lawyer was much the same as it had been in Texas’ days as a republic: “get your legal education by reading the law” under the tutelage of an older lawyer; be over 21 years old and of “good moral deportment”; and present yourself to the local district judge for an oral examination before a committee of local lawyers. Being admitted to practice in 19th century Texas was so extraordinarily easy that even notorious outlaw and convicted murderer John Wesley Hardin was admitted to the Texas bar (following a 15-year jail stay for one murder).