Five of the Greatest: Joseph Henry Stuart (Circa 1851-1910), 0716 COBJ, Vol. 45 No. 7 Pg. 51
| Author | Anna Martinez, J. |
Anna Martinez, J.
Lawyer, political activist, and one of Colorado's first black legislators are just a few of the titles Joseph Henry Stuart held while living in Colorado from 1891 until his death in 1910. His educational achievements during one of the most contentious and difficult eras of American history—the Reconstruction Era—make him one of Colorado's greatest lawyers.
Legal Education in the Era of Reconstruction
Joseph Henry Stuart was born circa 18511 on the island of Barbados in the British West Indies. He later emigrated to Halifax, Nova Scotia, before making his way to South Carolina, where he was admitted to the University of South Carolina to study law in 1873.2 He was licensed to practice law in South Carolina on December 6, 1875.3
Stuart attended the University of South Carolina during a remarkable period in the school's history. From 1873 to 1877, the University of South Carolina was known as Reconstruction University.4 After the Civil War, the Reconstruction Acts attempted to reform the Southern states by integrating public accommodations, political offices, and educational institutions. Reconstruction University was conceived in 1869 by the University of South Carolina's first black trustees, with the aim of removing economic obstacles to education, such as tuition fees, room rent, and library fees.5 The trustees, along with the first elected Reconstruction Govemor, Robert K. Scott,6 established scholarships and revised the educational structure by creating a preparatory school as a department of the university, a sub-freshman class, and a coeducational normal college7 on the university campus. 8
It was during the Reconstruction Era that Joseph Stuart attended law school, earning his degree in 18759 alongside Mortimer Alanson Warren, the first headmaster of South Carolina's Preparatory School and State Normal School, and Thomas McCarts Stewart, a prominent newspaperman and appointee to the Supreme Court of Liberia.10 The Reconstruction University was short-lived, however, holding its last commencement exercises in June 1877. The experiment was ended by Govemor Wade Hampton III, a Confederate soldier and member of a prominent planter family who completely shuttered public education at the university to black students, a situation that continued until the 1960s.11 Hampton's election effectively ended all Reconstruction efforts in South Carolina and imposed Black Codes12 that kept people like Stuart from practicing law. Fortunately for Stuart, he was licensed to practice law before Hampton became Governor.
Moving West to Build a Future
Records show that by 1880 Stuart had moved west to Kansas, where he appears to have been a Federal Census Enumerator that year and identified his occupation as “Attorney.”13 By 1883, he was officially admitted to practice law in Kansas and had opened a thriving law practice in Topeka.14 Stuart quickly became involved in local politics, trying one of the state’s first school desegregation cases that, albeit unsuccessful, served as a model for another Topeka school desegregation suit: Brown v. Board of Education.15
Stuart eventually left Kansas for Colorado, where he was admitted to the bar on motion to the Supreme Court on December 1, 1891.16 Stuart opted to practice law in Denver, setting up shop at the Kittredge Building, Denver’s most modern building at the time, complete with electricity, steam heat, and elevators.[17]
Election to the General Assembly
While in Colorado, Stuart established himself in the black community and took up the most controversial issue of the day—women’s suffrage. Stuart, a Republican, worked with the local black women’s club, which advocated for both racial equality and the right to vote. Among Stuart’s staunchest advocates was Elizabeth Piper Ensley, the Denver correspondent for Woman’s ERA, the official publication of the National Association of Colored Women.18 Ensley, a local suffragette, founded the Colorado Non-Partisan Equal Suffrage Association in 1893.19 The non-partisan aspect of the organization was key to winning allies in the Populist Party, which had just elected Governor Davis H. Waite, who eventually signed the Equal Suffrage Act into law on December 2, 1893.20
In 1894, after the achievement of suffrage in the state, Ensley, with fellow suffragette and clubwoman Ida DePriest, formed the Colored Woman’s Republican Club and worked to elect Stuart to the General Assembly.21 Ensley wrote in the June 1894 issue of Woman’s ERA:
The...
To continue reading
Request your trial