Oklahoma law journal particulars contributions of Black legal professionals, civil rights struggles in court docket system earlier than and after 1921 | Nationwide Information

As part of its effort to commemorate the 100th year since the Tulsa Race Massacre, the Oklahoma Bar Association devoted the majority of its May magazine issue to stories about Black Oklahomas and legal achievements they have made since it was established.

Among the most notable results, according to one researcher, Oklahoma had more black attorneys than any other state before 1921 – estimated at more than 60, at least four times the number of Texas attorneys at the same time. Then came the events of May 31st and June 1st, 1921.

“This underscores how much of a land of opportunity Oklahoma has been for blacks for so long,” said researcher John Browning, an attorney and retired judge who is admitted to the bar in Oklahoma and Texas.

“Among other things, Oklahoma was famous for having a number of all-black communities and, like Tulsa, offering black people opportunities to achieve greater upward economic mobility.”

Browning, who co-curated the May issue of the Oklahoma Bar Association Journal, wrote about three of the state’s first black attorneys and their work prior to the 1921 massacre. The list included Sugar T. George, who represented a city as a Muscogee member National Tribal Council in 1868 and later a judge who – after he was born into slavery in Georgia – was known to be successful in the field before he died in 1900.

Another of Oklahoma’s first black attorneys, George Napier Perkins, was also born into slavery in Tennessee but moved to Oklahoma to practice law in the 1890s. However, Perkins decided to start a newspaper in Guthrie – which became a guide for blacks planning to move to Oklahoma – after unsuccessfully running for an elected office in a climate of racial discrimination.

Browning’s chronology also showed that Perkins campaigned repeatedly for the repeal of the Jim Crow-era grandfather clause, even though he died before the US Supreme Court did so.

After all, Kentucky-based William Henry Twine was one of the first black attorneys in Texas before moving to Chandler in 1891 during the opening of the Sac and Fox Land Run. He opened a law farm with two partners and was the first black attorney to be admitted to US district courts in Indian territory before deciding to get into the newspaper business.

Twine also helped found the Oklahoma Anti-Lynching Bureau in 1905 and pushed for more social acceptance of black attorneys by writing about his and others’ exclusion from the bar association’s activities on the basis of race.

As Jim Crow’s laws continued to go into effect, Browning said the research he found shows it became extremely difficult for black attorneys to pursue a legal career. And by the 1940s, there was no longer a separate bar association for black attorneys based in Oklahoma.

In another article in a legal journal by OU Law professor Cheryl Wattley, she described the case of Ada Lois Sipuel, a black woman who applied for admission to the university’s law school and had to fight her battle in the US Supreme Court. Wattley said the case preceded the landmark Brown v Board of Education decision.

She said racial segregation played a role in creating a separate legal program called the Langston School of Law, which she said was “farcically touted as ‘essentially the same’ as the one in which white students could enroll in the basis of OU Law, Sipuel 1948 to refuse admission to his law school with white students.

“The Langston School of Law consisted of three rooms that were rented from the State Capitol, including a classroom that was a converted storage cabinet,” Wattley wrote. “Resolutions were passed to incorporate the OU Law School bulletin and course descriptions. An agreement was made to allow Langston Law School students access to the Capitol state law library. A part-time dean and two part-time professors were hastily hired.”

The US Supreme Court later found that Amendment 14 black students had a right to education and could obtain admission “once it is granted to another applicant”. The opinion led to Dr. George McLaurin, whose argument quoted the opinion in Sipuel’s case, became the first black student to enroll at the OU.

The Oklahoma Historical Society’s Tulsa World archives contained a photo of Tulsa’s attorney BC Franklin – the father of historian John Hope Franklin – who worked out of a tent after the 1921 attack on Greenwood destroyed his office that would have been the materials used to restore the Greenwood District as it would prevent the black residents from acquiring resources to rebuild.

Franklin was known throughout his career for helping those who, like himself, had lost their property during the massacre. His account of the events has again drawn attention in recent years, but a little-known Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling in 1926 on an insurance dispute filed by William Redfearn, a white building owner in Greenwood, also provides important details .

“At the criminal end, no whites were charged, but a number of African Americans were charged with causing the riot,” Browning said of the situation. “These were eventually dropped, but that just goes to show how perverse the legal system’s treatment was.”

He said the file in Redfearn’s case, although not a criminal matter, revealed that local authorities at the time were “not only passive but actively participating in the violence” against African Americans.

Redfearn had appealed a judgment in favor of its insurance provider that contained a clause that the policy did not cover losses “directly or indirectly” through invasion, insurrection, riot, civil war or riot or military or usurped power or by order of any civil authority. “

The minutes record the “conflicting narratives of white and black Tulsa” in the testimony for the case.

“The evidence conclusively shows that there was riot in the city of Tulsa from May 31, 1921, from about 10 p.m. to about noon the following day; and during that time all of the buildings in the Negro neighborhood of Tulsa where the buildings involved in this lawsuit were located were completely destroyed by fire, “the appeals court wrote.

Browning said many records of the violence were either gone or forcibly removed, which is why it was unusual for the 1926 Supreme Court decision in Redfearn’s case to include so much detail about the massacre.

He said he was confident that the information in the magazine would be illuminating on lesser-known aspects of Oklahoma’s black history.

“I think everyone in society would benefit from knowing more about this aspect of our history, this aspect of Oklahoma history, and certainly this aspect of tragic events like the Tulsa Race massacre,” he said. “A lot of people see us lawyers as leaders in the community, and sometimes we as lawyers are less informed than we’d like to be.

“I thought it would be a service to the bar association to bring this information to the public and a service to the community as a whole.”