JAMES MILTON TURNER WAS MISSOURI'S FIRST BLACK LAWYER
I would proffer James Milton Turner as being the first black lawyer in Missouri. About twenty-years ago I had asked this question of primacy to the Missouri Supreme Court and to the Missouri Bar. Neither knew.
They sent me to (BAMSL), the Bar Association of Metropolitan St. Louis for an answer. BAMSL did not know either. But it did to send me certain articles that claimed some lawyers from the 1890s were first.
I doubt the credibility of their claim. I doubt their truth, and historical reliability, because in the 1880s, James Milton Turner, who had founded black public schools in Missouri, in the 1860s; who was the first United States Consul to Haiti in the Ulysses S. Grant Administration, in the 1870s, was, in the early 1880s practicing law in Oklahoma on multiple land claims of behalf Negro tribesmen of the "Five Civilized Tribes." The Indians were removed to then-named "Indian Territory" from their native lands back East, in the infamous "Trail of Tears," in the 1830-1840s. The procession had crossed over the Mississippi River into Missouri, before entering into Oklahoma.
The "Five Civilized Tribes, had had many black slaves , who had also acquired land rights from Congress in federal legislation at war's end.
These laws were passed to punish and to reduce the power and influence such Indians, many of whom had fought for and with the Confederate States of America (CSA) in the 4-years Civil War as fellow slaveholders of black people.
Dr. Gary Kremer, the Executive Director of the State Historical Society of Missouri, has written a book entitled "James Milton Turner," which is a source I have utilized in reaching this conclusion and in making this asseveration, as Turner was also a Grand Master of the Prince Hall Masons of Missouri.
There were no state bar exams in Missouri, when James Milton Turner began practicing in this state, and according to some authorities, who or what a lawyer was in those wild and woolly 19th century, Missouri days was a subject of great subjective fluidity and genuine controversy for the whole legal profession!
http://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi…
Therefore I maintain my point that James Milton Turner was the first black lawyer in Missouri! A more interesting, possibly important, question may well be who was the State of Missouri 's first white lawyer? That one beats me! Ha👍🏿
