Unheralded Black Legal Pioneer to Get His Due, 166 Years Late

Maryland’s Supreme Court is set to take a step toward rectifying the state’s racist past, recognizing that Edward Garrison Draper should have been the state’s first Black lawyer when he applied in 1857.

Draper will be posthumously admitted to the state bar in a special session in Annapolis on Oct. 26 — 166 years after a judge in Baltimore said he was qualified in all respects to practice in Maryland except for a statute limiting the profession to White citizens. Draper instead moved to a colony in Liberia, with plans to pursue a career denied to him in the state of his birth.

Since then, Maryland has been home to trailblazing Black lawyers such as Thurgood Marshall. But Draper’s story remained a little-known tale of racial discrimination until it drew the attention of the Maryland high court, thanks to a lawyer in Texas who came across Draper’s rejected bar application and led a campaign to right a historic wrong.

“When people think about pioneering early Black lawyers, we tend to think about Thurgood Marshall, but there were pioneers long before that,” said John Browning, the lawyer who spearheaded Draper’s posthumous bar petition. “The story of Black lawyers in Maryland began with Edward Garrison Draper.”

A through line can be drawn between Draper, who is believed to be the first Black person to apply for a Maryland law license, and the racial diversity of the industry today, Browning said.

Lawyers of color represented 19% of the profession, according to an American Bar Association 2022 survey. But Black attorneys accounted for just 4.5%, down from 4.7% a decade earlier, while the Black population makes up about 14% of the US population.

In recent years, the Biden administration has made a push to diversify the federal judiciary, including nominating Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, making her the first Black woman to sit on that bench. However, many federal trial courts have never had a Black judge.

Draper’s experience illustrates how “there really was not a space for Black lawyers in the profession for a very long time, and stories like this one remind us that the effects we see today in the profession,” said Danielle Holley, the president of Mount Holyoke College and former dean of Howard Law School. “That severe underrepresentation comes from this historic racial discrimination.”

‘Qualified in All Respects’

Draper, born in Maryland in 1834, had an economic background and upbringing rare for a Black child of the era. Draper’s father, a member of the free Black population of Baltimore, was a successful tobacconist and cigar-maker. He placed a priority on his son’s education, according to Browning’s research, which was based on contemporary archives, letters and prior articles and books on Maryland and Black lawyers.

At the time, a state-funded group called the Maryland Colonization Society was establishing a colony for its Black population in the West African nation of Liberia. While some in the Black community derided the project, Garrison Draper thought his only child might get the rights and opportunities in Liberia that he was denied at home, noted Browning.

He sent his son to a public school in Philadelphia. Edward later elected to go to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, passing an entrance examination consisting of Greek, Latin, English, and math.

Draper was the only Black student in his class, but the campus included a “liberal, if not radical, group of students and faculty” who supported abolition, said Dr. Forrester “Woody” Lee, a Dartmouth graduate who has chronicled Black students who attended the school before the Civil War.

Draper also began college at the same time that some Black Dartmouth graduates began emigrating to Liberia since their degrees served little use in the US, said Lee, a professor emeritus at the Yale School of Medicine.

By the time Draper was in college, Macon Bolling Allen in 1844 had become the first Black attorney in Maine, and a handful of other Black attorneys had gained law licenses. But knowing that Maryland would not let him practice law as a Black man, Draper ultimately set the goal of becoming the Liberian colony’s first college-educated attorney fully trained in the law, Browning wrote.

He studied for two years under a retired Baltimore attorney in accordance with Maryland’s requirements for practicing attorneys of the time. Only a handful of law schools existed prior to the Civil War, and most lawyers trained by “reading the law.”

Draper also traveled to Boston to receive additional training from Charles Storey, who once trained in the law offices of Benjamin Curtis, a dissenting justice in the March 1857 Dred Scott decision ruling that American citizenship did not extend to people of African descent.

Seven months after that decision, Draper presented himself for examination before a Baltimore judge, who found Draper to be “qualified in all respects to be admitted to the bar in Maryland, if he was a free white citizen,” wrote Browning, citing state archives. Maryland law forbade Black men from gaining admission.

Edward Draper’s move to Liberia was announced in the Philadelphia Ledger in 1858.

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That same judge, however, furnished Draper with a “certificate” that could help the lawyer establish a practice in Liberia. Six days later, in November 1857, Draper and his wife, Jane Rebecca Jordan, boarded the Mary Caroline Stevens bound for the colony, according to Browning’s research.

The prospect prompted enthusiasm in the press. A report in the Philadelphia Ledger, a daily newspaper, in 1858 noted Draper was the son of a “highly respected coloured resident of Baltimore” and that he was destined to “possess a large and lucrative practice.”

Within a year of his arrival, however, Draper died of tuberculosis. He was 24 and left behind no descendants, Browning said in an interview.

‘Passion Project’

Browning, a 59-year-old partner at the law firm Spencer Fane, became familiar Draper’s story as part of research he’s done on early generations of Black lawyers in the US. Born and raised in New Jersey, he said this “passion project” has its roots in the Black history courses he enrolled in as an undergraduate student at Rutgers University.

“I do this because I feel we are in danger of losing this connection to our professional forebears,” Browning said. “We should know about these figures in history and the fact that we don’t is kind of scary to me.”

His work, Browning said, has led him to people such as Everett J. Waring, a Baltimore native who in 1885 became Maryland’s first Black attorney and would later go on to become one of the first Black lawyers to argue before the Supreme Court.

Diving deeper into Waring’s successful effort to integrate the Maryland bar led Browning to a much broader look at the “whole history of Black lawyers in Maryland,” he said. He discovered Draper’s rejected bar application, as well as accounts of his background from previous articles and books focused on Black attorneys.

“I thought, ‘Here’s a person who is deserving of far more than history has given him,’” Browning said.

Browning had previously found success in campaigning for a posthumous bar admission. In 2020, he and Carolyn Wright, a former chief justice on the Texas Fifth Court of Appeals, successfully petitioned the Texas Supreme Court to posthumously admit J.H. Williams, a Black man whose attempt in 1882 to join the state bar was denied.

Browning said a successful campaign in 2015 to get Hon Yen Chang posthumously admitted , a Chinese man denied entry into the California bar in 1890, inspired his push in Texas. But it wasn’t until the police killing of George Floyd and the subsequent reckoning on race relations in the US that his call for Williams’ posthumous admission gained a receptive audience.

“Initially, I even heard from an attorney who said, ‘don’t be an activist,’” said Browning.

He set about writing an article, titled “To Fight The Battle, First You Need Warriors,” about Draper and the path to integrating Maryland’s bar, which was published in the University of Baltimore Law Review Forum in fall 2022 with a call for Draper’s posthumous admission.

John Browning calls his research of early Black lawyers a “passion project.”

In February, he then raised the prospect of recognizing Draper at a Baltimore Law School symposium attended by Matthew Fader, the chief justice of Maryland’s Supreme Court. Fader spoke with Browning and others following the presentation and invited them to file a formal petition.

Browning, Baltimore Law School professor José Anderson and Maryland lawyer Domonique A. Flowers filed a petition in March, accompanied by letters from groups including the Black Alumni of Dartmouth Association. The state Supreme Court said in July that it would grant the petition, making Draper the seventh person to be posthumously admitted to a state bar after being denied entry on racial grounds.

“The story has a lot of resonance today,” Fader said in an interview. “Lawyers are advocates for clients and we want the legal profession to represent everybody and to be open to everybody.”

Browning is currently working on a posthumous New York bar petition for Ely Parker, a Seneca man who once served as military secretary to Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War.

What Draper Symbolizes

The upcoming recognition of Draper comes at a time when diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, is “at the forefront of conversations in a lot of industries and the courts,” said Monya Bunch, the DEI director of national law firm WilmerHale. Roughly 80% of the top law firms in the US today have a full-time diversity, equity and inclusion role, according to a Bloomberg Law survey.

“It’s an encouragement and reminder from whence we’ve come, how far we’ve come,” she said of Draper.

Still, the “danger” in the recognition “is that we leave it as a historical wrong being righted,” said Anthony Thompson, the founding director of the center on race, inequality and law at New York University Law School. “There are massive contemporary implications.”

While Maryland integrated its bar in the 19th century, Black applicants failed to pass the bar exam at far higher rates than their white peers up until the 1970s. The pass-fail rates were so lopsided that it was viewed by Black applicants as “a joke to take the Maryland bar,” said A. Dwight Pettit, a 1970 Howard Law School graduate.

After failing the test, Pettit in 1972 sued the state of Maryland over racial discrimination in the bar exam, which he said led to reforms such as the elimination of the personal interview portion of the exam and the inclusion of a Black examiner.

The changes had an “immediate impact,” said Pettit, who went on to become a prominent trial attorney in Baltimore.

But “activities at almost every level” continue to create “chokepoints” that are keeping certain groups out of the profession, Thompson said. He pointed to a longstanding lack of Black law professors and leaders in the profession, as well as placement tests putting people from underrepresented backgrounds at a disadvantage because of fewer resources.

“While there is a historical tie” in Draper’s travails to the lack of Black lawyers in the profession today, “the current situation is more tied to these current systems,” he said.

Still, recognizing Draper’s legacy within that larger struggle to diversify the legal system can help “influence the entire image of the profession,” said Baltimore Law’s Anderson.

“It can be transformational,” he said, “having people understand the legal system continues to work towards improvement.”