Description
In the final decades of the 19th century, African American lawyers were a noticeable feature of the legal landscape of the Old Dominion. Although their numbers were not large in absolute terms, between 60 and 70 at the end of the 19th century, black lawyers played an important role in the state's large African American community. In no other part of the United States were there as many black lawyers as in Virginia, and nowhere else did significant numbers of black lawyers match the economic success achieved by Virginia's most prominent black lawyers. However, subsequent events would establish this era as the hight point for the African American bar in Virginia. Professor Hylton examines the reasons for the steady growth of the African American bar in Virginia between 1870 and 1900 and for its decline in the 20th century. After 1900, the number of black lawyers in the state declined dramatically, and it would not be until the 1960s that the number of African American lawyers in Virginia would again match the totals achieved in the 1890s. Professor Hylton argues that the growth of the African American bar in Virginia was the product of the state's lax admissions standards for lawyers and the exisence of a "social space" in the post-Reconstruction decades in which black lawyers were able to create a market for their services without posing a serious threat to their white counterparts in the legal profession. He attributes the decline in the number of African American lawyers after 1900 in part to the hardening of racial attitudes that accompanied the introduction of the Jim Crow system but more importantly to the implementations of a more rigorous system of bar admissions in 1896. Although the adoption of this new system was motivated more by a concern about a growing number of "incompetent" white lawyers than it was by a concern over the existence of black lawyers, its impact on potential black lawyers was severe, given their lack of access to formal legal education at the state's three whites-only law schools. Academic Year 2003-2004, Academic Year 2005-2006
