Diversity in The Florida Bar.

• Author: Blakenship, Gary

"Back then black lawyers practiced in segregated courthouses. There were separate drinking fountains and separate bathrooms," Judge Hatchett recalled.

Probably the greatest irony when The Florida Bar was formed is it was known as the "integrated" Bar.

In this case integrated meant the new organization combined government regulation of the profession with the social and other aspects of the former Florida State Bar Association.

It most assuredly did not mean racial integration, and very little gender integration. The Bar formed just as Virgil Hawkins began his lawsuit seeking to be the first African-American admitted to the University of Florida law school. Even though he was ultimately successful in the U.S. Supreme Court, the Florida Supreme Court three times refused admission. (The court last year held a formal ceremony to apologize for its role in the Hawkins case.)

The first case, in 1950, at least acknowledged that the Bar would include African-Americans, referring to a separate law school that was being set up for them at Florida A&M University. (It opened in 1951 with four professors and seven students, and ran for 15 years.)

But when Joseph Hatchett, future Florida Supreme Court justice and U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals chief judge, came to Florida in 1959, he estimated there were fewer than 25 black lawyers.

"We all knew each other, because we'd all been to the same law school at Howard University in Washington, which was about as far as a black from the Deep South got at that time," he said.

"Back then black lawyers practiced in segregated courthouses. There were separate drinking fountains and separate bathrooms," Hatchett recalled in a 1984 Bar Journal article. "I remember going into the DeLand courthouse for the first time and looking around for my client's family. It was the first time that it dawned on me that black people--at that time, in that area--sat in a special mezzanine over the main courthouse."

When Supreme Court Justice Leader J. Shaw, Jr., took the bar exam in 1960 at a Miami hotel, "the management came around and said that we [African-American] could all take the bar in this room [with white applicants], but we would not be allowed to eat with the rest of them at the hotel. These kinds of things, you find it hard now to conceive of something like that happening."

Shaw taught at the FAMU law school and later was an assistant public defender and then assistant state attorney in Duval County, becoming chief of...