The seminar will examine historical and contemporary sources that illuminate the changing roles of African American lawyers from the nineteenth century to the present. Little is known about black lawyers of any era preceding the 1970s, save for generally laudatory biographies of mid- to late-twentieth-century civil rights figures. The course will cast a critical eye on the professional and social roles played by the men and women who comprise the black bar, both in the pre-1970s period and in the present. It will relate those roles to the structure of the legal profession, the social structure of African American communities, and the profound difficulty of claiming a racial link between lawyers, clients and communities.
