Black Lawyers in the 1930s

African-American lawyers were a scarce commodity in 1930.

A recent post on the ConLawBlog posed the question of how many African-American lawyers there were in the United States in 1930.  This is a subject that I have been studying for some time, and thanks to a heads up from Professor Idleman, I was able to answer the question.

According to the U.S. Census, in 1930, there were only 1247 black lawyers in the entire United States in 1930, out of a total number of 160,605 lawyers.  Of the 1247, 1223 were male and only 24 were female.

Even though the Great Migration had begun after World War I, the bulk of the African-American population still lived in the South in 1930. However, thanks to racial prejudice and limited economic opportunities below the Mason-Dixon line, a significant majority of black lawyers lived outside the South.

The largest concentrations of black male lawyers was in Illinois, which had 187 male African-American attorneys.

Other states with significant numbers were New York (117); Ohio (94); Michigan (63); and Indiana (62). The only Southern jurisdictions with comparable numbers were the District of Columbia (94); and Virginia (57).

Complete state-by-state breakdowns for the 24 females are not provided in the published Census Reports for 1930.  The largest number of black female lawyers appears to have been in the District of Columbia, where there were four.

As a percentage of total lawyers, black male lawyers accounted for more than 2% of total male lawyers only in the District of Columbia (2.8%) and Virginia (2.4%). If female lawyers are included — and the number of female lawyers in those two jurisdictions is available — the percentage of black lawyers in each of those two jurisdictions actually goes up slightly, but was still less than 3%.

Nowhere was the absence of black lawyers in 1930 more shocking than in the Deep South.  In spite of the large black population, proportionately much larger than it is today, Alabama had only 4 black lawyers, while Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida had only 6, 8, and 10, respectively.  The totals for Georgia and South Carolina were just 14 and 13.

Black lawyers were more numerous in the other former Confederate states, but only slightly: North Carolina (27), Tennessee (26), Arkansas (16), and Texas (20).

Not surprisingly, given the small pre-World War II black population of Wisconsin, black lawyers were scarce in the Badger State.  According to the 1930 Census, there were only three black male lawyers in Wisconsin in 1930, although there was also at least one black female attorney, former Marquette law student Mabel Raimey.  (The three black male lawyers included law partners George Heriot DeReef, A.B. Nutt, and James Weston Dorsey, and Ambrose B. Nutt, all of Milwaukee.)

By way of comparison, Minnesota had 11 black lawyers in 1930, while Iowa had 7.  North and South Dakota had none.

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The Titanic’s Connection to Electronic Communications Privacy

One hundred years ago this weekend, the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland and sank. The event was big news then and has remained so for a century, due in no small part to the number of wealthy people who died or were aboard: John Jacob Astor IV; Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon; Molly Brown; Benjamin Guggenheim; and Isidor Straus. It was a bit as if the Kodak Theatre caught fire during the Academy Awards. (Compare the Titanic to the RMS Empress of Ireland, which sank in the mouth of the St. Lawrence two years later with a loss of more passengers, although considerably fewer crew. Celine Dion sings no songs about the Empress of Ireland.)

There are many fascinating aspects of the story, including the recently uncovered evidence of what exactly caused the ship to sink — not a massive gash in its hull, as had long been supposed, but rather a buckling of the plates over five compartments, due in part to the failure of potentially substandard rivets. For want of a rivet, the Titanic was lost. And there’s also the interesting question of why there was so little panic among the passengers as the ship went down. But I want to focus on one that I’m fairly sure is not going to get covered this week: the connection between the sinking of the Titanic and our modern Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the federal law that makes it a crime to intercept communications without either a court order or the consent of one of the parties.

The connection stems from the role of “wireless telegraphy” — radio, as it’s now known — in the Titanic disaster.

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The Use and Misuse of History

In his novel 1984, George Orwell imagined a future world where a government at war could switch allegiances with the country’s enemies and allies and a docile public would accept the revised version of history unquestioningly.  Orwell, a keen observer of the modern world, recognized that history itself could be manufactured and manipulated in the service of broader purposes.

This morning’s edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel contains an opinion piece by Chrisitian Schneider of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI) entitled “Not What They Meant Democracy to Look Like.”  In it, Mr. Schneider argues that the current effort to recall Governor Scott Walker and other elected state officials runs contrary to the original intent of Senator Bob La Follette and other advocates of the recall provisions of the Wisconsin State Constitution.  His op ed is excerpted from a larger piece that Mr. Schneider has authored for WPRI entitled “The History of the Recall in Wisconsin.”

In the newspaper piece, Mr. Schneider makes the assertion that “a review of documents and press accounts from the time the recall constitutional amendment passed shows that the current use of the recall is far different from what the original drafters had envisioned.”  His argument is that the recall provisions of the Wisconsin Constitution were intended to apply solely to judges and state senators, and not to executive branch officials such as the governor, because the two year term of office in place for governors at the time that the amendment passed would have made the recall of a governor impractical.

The historical record is completely contrary to Mr. Schneider’s assertion.  Moreover, the evidence that he relies upon is completely inadequate to establish the existence of the skewed original intent that he advances.

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