TBA Law Blog

TBA Law Blog

Law Professor Looks at Tennessee’s Black Pioneers in the Law

Posted by: Stacey Shrader Joslin on Feb 12, 2021
News Type: Black History Month

University of Tennessee College of Law professor Dwight Aarons wrote about some of the first black lawyers in Tennessee in the November 1999 issue of the Tennessee Bar Journal. His piece acknowledged that while it is not entirely clear who was the first African-American lawyer in Tennessee, it is accepted that Horatio N. Rankin was the earliest documented Black lawyer admitted to any bar in the state. Rankin practiced law in Memphis, created the West Tennessee Colored University and advised Congress on the freedman’s laws. Other “firsts” Aarons covers in his article include Alfred Menefee, the first Black man admitted to the Nashville bar; Joseph H. Dismukes, the first graduate of Tennessee’s first law school for African Americans and the state’s first Black law professor; William Francis Yardley, who likely was the first Black judicial officer in the state; John Sinclair Lewis, the first African-American admitted to practice before the Tennessee Supreme Court; Samuel R. Lowery, the first southern Black man admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court; and Tennessee Supreme Court Justice Adolpho A. Birch Jr., who became the court’s first Black chief justice. Read more about these and other pioneers in this compelling historical review.

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