A Look at Local Early African American Attorneys in Southwest Tennessee

Attorney Samuel McElwee was born a slave in Madison County, Tennessee in 1857. He would move to Haywood County where he represented the area in the state legislature in Nashville during the 1880s., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

A look at local early African-American attorneys

Feb. 7, 2014
Written by Ed Bryant
Jackson Sun

Perhaps the earliest Jackson link to an African-American attorney was an indirect one by our Chancellor E. L. Bullock who had a young black man, H. M. Bomar of Memphis, read the law with him and who later would be admitted to practice law there in 1897.

A previous article by this writer described the efforts of Dr. Myles Lynk to establish a law school at Lane Institute in 1901. As law school dean, Memphis attorney and law graduate of Central Tennessee University Law School (Nashville), H.R. Saddler taught the first and only law class. It produced three attorneys who were admitted to the bar in Madison County. However, none of the three graduates — Dr. Lynk, the Rev. Robert F. Hart and the Rev. John W. Grant — remained in Jackson. As well, Dean Saddler returned to Memphis to his law practice.

It would be a number of years before John Emmett Ballard, the true pioneer black attorney in Jackson, began law practice here in his hometown about 1935. It was one he sustained for some 40 years. Mr. Richard Donnell often met with him over a meal downtown, and knew him to have read the law for his legal training and for his wise guidance. Early on, Ballard served as a key officer in the local NAACP, a group that corresponded with the national headquarters, and as often as not, dealt directly with then attorney, and future Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall during the 1940s. Early on in his career, Mr. Ballard had Jackson’s second black attorney join him as a partner — Edmond Ragan of Humboldt. Himself a Lane College graduate, Mr. Ragan also was admitted to the bar through studying the law and passing the examination. In 1935, Ragan moved his law practice to Clarksville for a time and then on to Chicago where he founded the law firm Ragan & Robinson.

Mr. Ballard remained in Jackson alone and extended his work into the growing local civil rights movement, which included representation in cases involving arrests for sit-ins at Woolworth’s Five and Dime Store and marches by protesters. These included both local citizens and Lane students of that day. Also, he significantly contributed to the Department of Justice and the NAACP school desegregation matters of that time.

Mr. Ballard was a long-time member of the Madison County Bar Association and died in 1977. In great part to the efforts of Mr. Ballard and others in different places, the law school doors were opened wider for Richard Donnell, Jerry Cox, Linda Sesson Taylor, Judge Nathan Pride, Sheila Stevenson and others.

Beyond these African-American attorneys who lived and those who now practice in Jackson, there were others of that era, and even earlier, who had some touch with this city, but made their contributions elsewhere. For example, there was Donald Hollowell, a World War II veteran from Kansas, who graduated at Lane College and then Loyola University Law School in 1951. He represented Dr. Martin Luther King in Atlanta during the early civil rights movement and was called “the dean of black lawyers in Georgia.” Among others, he mentored Washington, D.C., power attorney Vernon Jordan.

Raised in Jackson, the Rev. James Frank Estes obtained his law degree about 1943, and beyond his significant criminal defense practice in the region, he was in the forefront of West Tennessee civil rights. Often, he made the long drive to Washington, D.C., to visit with Department of Justice officials. And Dr. King once wrote to him: “We have gained new courage and determination from your unfaltering perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds. May you continue in the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.”

Samuel Allen McElwee, who was born here in Madison County in 1857, but grew up in Haywood County, was a graduate of Oberlin College of Ohio. He finished his law school at the Central Tennessee Law School, at a time when he already had been elected and was serving in the Tennessee State Legislature from Haywood County. There, he fought for better education and against Jim Crow bills in the legislature. It is also noted of him that he was the first and only black attorney to practice law in Haywood County until the decade of the 1960’s.

And there was George L. Vaughn who also graduated from Lane College. He took his law school at Walden University in Nashville — formerly known as Central Tennessee. Following service in the Army during the First World War, he set his practice in St. Louis. Among the many accomplishments of his career was his civil rights lawsuit Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948, when the Supreme Court agreed with Vaughn that certain homeowner association restrictive covenants amounted to racial discrimination. Thurgood Marshall argued a companion case of McGhee v. Sipes.