More than 160 years after being denied the opportunity to practice law in Maryland, a campaign has been launched to get one Black man admitted to the Old Line State’s bar.
Thanks to several attorneys familiar with his story, Edward Garrison Draper’s legacy will no longer have an asterisk next to it.
On Thursday, Feb. 16, a panel of scholars and historians gathered at the University of Baltimore to discuss Draper and how race and slavery stopped him from being the first Black man to be a lawyer in the state of Maryland.
Led by José F. Anderson, the Dean Joseph Curtis Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law, the symposium featured historian, Texas lawyer, and retired justice John G. Browning and Maryland attorney Domonique Flowers. They believe that they can develop a strategy to right the great wrong that kept Draper from practicing law in the United States.
Browning, who has been researching Draper’s life for years, said, “Justice doesn’t have an expiration date,” according to the Daily Record, and has joined Flowers in his effort to have the man posthumously admitted to the bar and recognized as a lawyer in the state.
Draper’s qualifications are vast, all three scholars noted, with Browning sharing that although Draper was amply qualified, Superior Court Judge Zachaeus Collins Lee, a first cousin of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, concluded that the Black man was not a “free white citizen of this state,” and he could not gain entry to the bar.
Lee actually conducted Draper’s oral exam and issued him a certificate establishing his qualifications so that Draper could practice elsewhere — in Liberia, where many emancipated or free Black Americans emigrated in the mid-1800s. Draper, a Dartmouth graduate, succumbed to tuberculosis on Dec. 18, 1858, after living in Africa for one year.
Anderson, in an exclusive interview with Atlanta Black Star, spoke about the petition to have Draper…
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