The First Integration of the University of Maryland School of Law

The 1935 court order requiring the University of Maryland School of Law to admit Donald Gaines Murray was the first success of the NAACP's campaign to end segregation in the public schools, but it was not the first time the law school had been integrated. 1 Nearly half a century earlier, in 1889, two black students had graduated from the school. Two other black students attended during the next academic year, but the law school then excluded them and all other blacks until Murray reopened the doors. The story of that first, brief integration of the university law school began with the struggle of blacks to be admitted to the bar and ended with the tragedy of virulent racial prejudice. At the beginning of the nineteenth century each court in Maryland controlled the admission of lawyers to practice befure it. None admitted blacks. 2 In 1832 a state statute setting some urllform standards for bar admission limited eligibility to free, white males. This racial restriction may have been prompted by Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion in neighboring Virginia, an event that led the 1831-1832 session of the assembly to enact other laws designed to control both the slave and the free black populations. 3 The codification of racial discrimination made it more difficult to eliminate in later years when white society was more willing to accept the existence of black lawyers. The state prohibition against black attorneys did not end with ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1877 the Court of Appeals held that the amendment did not apply to admission to the bar. The following year an attempt to make black males eligible to practice law failed in the legislature. In 1884 the House of Delegates passed a measure striking the racial restriction, but it failed in the senate despite support for it expressed in newspaper editorials. 4 A Maryland court changed the law in 1885. Reasoning from an earlier decision of the United States Supreme Court, the Baltimore Supreme Bench held that excluding blacks from the practice of law was unconstitutional. On 10 October 1885 Everett Waring became the first black man admitted to legal practice in a state court in Maryland. 5 Maryland blacks now had a reason to study law. "Reading" law in a lawyer's office was one way to qualifY for practice, but few white lawyers would accept blacks. Only recently admitted to the Maryland bar themselves, black lawyers lacked the breadth of experience desirable in a mentor. 6 Law school offered a better alternative, and in 1887 two young black men applied to the University of Mary-