Race & Law – Page 31 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Part of the Way Along the Path of Racial Equity

Post author:Alan J. Borsuk
Post published:February 26, 2010
Post category:Civil Rights Race & Law Speakers at Marquette

US Supreme Court facade Lindsey Draper recalls that when he was a student at Marquette Law School, he would sometimes pause to look at photos of previous graduating classes. He would have a hard time spotting anyone who was African American like him.

As Draper (L ’75) looked out at about 50 people, many of them African Americans who are current law students, in Eisenberg Hall Wednesday evening, he agreed that the situation, not only in the Law School but across the American scene, has improved for black people in recent decades.

But Draper, who went on to be an assistant district attorney and a court commissioner in Milwaukee County, and three other community leaders emphasized how far things still have to go before it can be rightly said that America has become a “post-racial” society. The four took part in a panel discussion on the state of black America sponsored by the Black Law Students Association.

The Legacy of the Little Rock Crucible

Post author:Alan J. Borsuk
Post published:February 11, 2010
Post category:Education & Law Race & Law Speakers at Marquette

“That crucible moment” – that’s a phrase Ernest Green used to describe the period when he and eight other African American students enrolled in and attended Little Rock Center High School in 1957. It took the president of the United States and 10,000 soldiers to help them get in the door in deeply segregationist Arkansas. But more than anything, their success took the determination and self-control that the nine showed against almost overwhelming opposition and hate. The events of that fall became a huge landmark in the fight to end official segregation.

I didn’t expect to be as moved as I was when six of the nine took the stage at the Varsity Theater this week to receive Marquette’s highest honor, the Pere Marquette Discovery Award, from Father Robert Wild, S.J., the university’s president.

Maybe it was because I was just barely old enough at the time – I was seven – to have the television images from Little Rock permanently planted in my mind. And here they were, in person.

Horace Scurry: Our First African-American Law Student

Post author:J. Gordon Hylton
Post published:November 27, 2009
Post category:Legal Education Legal History Marquette Law School Marquette Law School History Race & Law

Horace S. Scurry was one of many fascinating individuals who passed through the Milwaukee Law School between the time of its founding in the early 1890’s and its merger with Marquette University in 1908. He appears to have been the first African-American to join the ranks of that institution’s students.

Details of Scurry’s life are meager. He was born in 1865 in Delaware, Ohio, and first arrived in Milwaukee in 1882 at age 17. He attended school in Milwaukee and then returned to Ohio, where he enrolled in Ohio Wesleyan College (which was in his hometown of Delaware). The college catalog listed him as a Milwaukee resident, and he apparently entered college with the intention of becoming a teacher. In 1900, he was working at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, as the steward of the teachers’ house and, reportedly, as a teacher.

He returned to Milwaukee at some point and enrolled in the Milwaukee Law School.

Although he studied law, he does not appear to have been admitted to the bar. The Milwaukee Law School was designed to prepare students for admission to the Wisconsin bar and did not award degrees of its own. However, in 1908, following the merger, Marquette University awarded a law degree to any former student of the Milwaukee Law School who had been admitted to the Wisconsin bar. Scurry’s name does not appear on the list of degree recipients, although it is possible that he was admitted but did not bother to apply for the Marquette degree.

In any event, Scurry’s future was in neither education nor law, but in religion. In the early twentieth century (if not sooner), he became an ordained Baptist minister. He was affiliated with the Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Milwaukee (a black Baptist church) and with the Wisconsin State Baptist Convention. After his entry into the ranks of the clergy, he retained an interest in politics and public affairs. The archives of the American Socialist Party contain a letter written to Scurry by Norman Thomas, the party’s perennial presidential candidate.

In 1935, Scurry, aged 70 and retired from the ministry, was awarded a monthly old-age pension of $30 from the Milwaukee county court. A story in the December 17, 1935, edition of the Milwaukee Journal reported the award of the pension by County Judge John C. Karel and mentioned Scurry’s prior affiliation with the Milwaukee Law School. Scurry died on June 6, 1943, still affiliated with the Mt. Zion Baptist Church.