In 1895, John Edward Hawkins is admitted to the King County Bar, becoming the first locally trained African American lawyer. He was from Galesburg, Illinois and worked as a barber while attending school at night.
John Edward Hawkins, King County's first Black lawyer to be locally trained, is admitted to the Bar in 1895.
- By Helen Lacy
- Posted 11/06/1998
- HistoryLink.org Essay 244
Sources:
Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle's Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1994), 31.
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