Post-Reconstruction white supremacy nearly eliminated black lawyers from the bar
Evidence
During Reconstruction, a few African American lawyers practiced in the southern states. One of these was Henry S. Harmon, in Florida. In the 1880’s, however, his legal career went into terminal decline, in the white supremacist atmosphere of the region; Harmon ended his life as a cabinetmaker and upholsterer, repairing furniture and caning chairs. The Howard University law school produced a crop of young black lawyers, and some of them practiced in the South. In other parts of the country, black lawyers were rare. They were totally unknown on Wall Street. The 1870 census listed only three in Massachusetts; there were fourteen listed for North Carolina in 1890, and something slightly above two dozen in Texas in 1900. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3666
Categorization
- XREF: Dovetails with the retreat-of-federal-will and Jim Crow chapters (74, 51) on legal institutional closure. — connects to: Post-enslavement black people faced total inescapable white supremacy; Anti-black economic harms went unprosecuted while criminality was reincarnated in new statutes; Racism persists even where formal segregation laws have been abolished (+1 more)