Edward Garrison Draper was posthumously admitted to the bar Thursday following a push by a White Texas lawyer with a passion for Black History.
Edward Garrison Draper was more prepared to be a lawyer than most White attorneys in the mid-19th century. He was one of the first Black graduates of Dartmouth College, when fewer than half of attorneys in his home state of Maryland held college degrees. He had somehow finagled apprenticeships with established lawyers — the equivalent of law school today — when there were very few avenues for Black men to obtain legal training.
“At the time that Draper was doing this, there were only a half-dozen Black lawyers in the U.S.,” said John G. Browning, 59, who traveled to Annapolis to make the formal motion for Draper’s admission before the court. “And for him to think this was a possibility was audacious and daring and spoke to the potential that he had.”Browning grew up in the 1960s and ’70s in Teaneck, N.J., not far from New York City.
The two bonded over their love of history and co-authored an article for the Howard Law Journal on early Black lawyers in Texas; that, in turn, led to co-presentations across the state. Browning expanded his research to other states. Black bar association chapters and law students began asking him to speak about what he had learned.
Earlier this year, Browning published an article in the University of Baltimore Law Forum on Draper and Everett J. Waring, who in 1885 achieved what Draper could not: admission as the first Black lawyer to the Maryland bar. He sent young Edward to Philadelphia for a better public school education, which enabled him to pass Dartmouth’s entrance exam requiring knowledge of subjects including geography, Greek and Latin. After earning high marks, he set his sights on becoming a lawyer, Browning wrote.
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