Law: Future Cloudy

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In 1843 Negro Robert Morris, 21, was admitted to the bar in Massachusetts, became the first U. S. Negro lawyer on record. In 1873, at Little Rock, Ark., Mifflin W. Gibbs became the first Negro municipal court judge. Not until 1937 when President Roosevelt named 32-year-old William Henry Hastie to be Federal judge in the Virgin Islands had a Negro ever sat on a Federal bench.

Last week the National Bar Association (Negro) held its annual convention at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in Philadelphia, surveyed the place of the Negro in the legal profession, found it discouraging. With a U. S. Negro population of 11,890,000 there are but 1,247 Negro lawyers. Of the largest group, Washington, D. C.'s 225, over half are "sun-downers"' who work at political jobs days and practice law evenings. New York City has 112 Negro lawyers, mostly in Harlem. In the entire South there are but 200. Southern Negroes are either too poor to pay a lawyer or else are likely to feel a white lawyer can do better for them in the courts. "The future is often cloudy and even ominous," complained chocolate-skinned Austin Thomas Walden of Atlanta to the convention. "The Negro, not yet wholly freed from the tentacles of the subservient and defeatist hereditary psychology created by 250 years of chattel slavery and surrounded by a dominant race which magnified and deified everything white, while minimizing, depreciating, if not anathematizing, everything black, which hypothesis was for a long time openly and brazenly supported by the law, and always supported by unbending and inflexible custom and tradition, . . . unconsciously felt that the law was not his field."

Not at the convention was Richard D. Evans, of Waco, Texas, a hero among Negro lawyers for his able but vain Court fights against the State law barring Negroes from registering in Democratic primaries. Philadelphia's lanky Raymond Pace Alexander, Harvard Law '23, who claims to be the "most active Negro lawyer" with 200 cases a year and net annual income of $20,000, reported that in the North things are somewhat better. Successful Negro lawyers can average about $5,000 a year. With a broad grin, Lawyer Alexander told how he delighted to go South on a case and force white lawyers to call him "Mr." "They'll gladly call you Professor, Colonel, or Doctor, but Mister sticks."