Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

Confirming black lawyer's admission to state bar, Pa. Supreme Court will "right an ancient wrong"

Abolitionist, educator, agitator, poet - George Boyer Vashon of Pittsburgh was all those things, and trained in the law as well.

George B. Vashon will be admitted to the bar 163 years after being denied over race.
George B. Vashon will be admitted to the bar 163 years after being denied over race.Read more

Abolitionist, educator, agitator, poet - George Boyer Vashon of Pittsburgh was all those things, and trained in the law as well.

But because he was black, he was denied a chance to practice law in Pennsylvania. So on Wednesday, the state Supreme Court is taking an unprecedented step, as Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille describes it, "to right an ancient wrong."

The court will present a certificate confirming Vashon's admission to the Pennsylvania bar, 163 years after he was first denied because of color.

Philadelphia lawyer Nolan N. Atkinson Jr. will be standing front and center at the Pittsburgh ceremony. He is a signer of the petition seeking the admission. And he is Vashon's great-grandson.

"I'd like to think it will mean something for the next generation of lawyers, and particularly lawyers of color," said Atkinson, 67, chief diversity officer at the Duane Morris law firm. "I hope it will mean the talent has always been there . . . and that accomplishments will happen if you pursue them as hard as you can."

At the 9:30 a.m. ceremony in Pittsburgh, the high court is to formally present a certificate in Vashon's name, complete with the identification number that every lawyer in the state receives upon admission to the bar.

Vashon's number will be 0001, Castille said Tuesday in an interview - "symbolically, the first."

Born in Carlisle in 1824 and raised in Pittsburgh, Vashon was "first" in several arenas - first black graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio, first black lawyer licensed in New York state. He studied law with a prominent Pittsburgh judge but was denied admission to the Allegheny County bar in 1847.

That denial led him to seek his fortune elsewhere. He went on to pass the New York bar, teach schoolchildren in Haiti, and win Reconstruction-era professorships at Howard University in Washington and Alcorn State University in Mississippi.

In 1868, he was admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court - but denied again in Allegheny County when he reapplied that year. Throughout his life, he kept up a family tradition of abolitionist activities and fighting for the rights of blacks.

The family home in Pittsburgh and Vashon's later residence in Syracuse, N.Y., were stops on the Underground Railroad. He helped fugitives from slavery fight for freedom in the courts.

His great-grandson Atkinson is a former member of the Lower Merion Township Board of Commissioners and a longtime advocate of diversity in the legal profession. But as Atkinson confesses, he knew little of his great-grandfather's history - until a nephew decided to investigate.

Paul N.D. Thornell, now a vice president at Citigroup in Washington, says he was a 5-year-old watching the television miniseries Roots in 1977 when a spark was lit.

Thornell began pestering his grandmother - Nolan Atkinson's mother, Frances Vashon Atkinson - about the family tree.

She told the boy about George Boyer Vashon.

"What excited me about what my grandmother was saying was the idea of being connected to people who came before me," remembers Thornell, 38. "It was a history lesson for me, and obviously a very personal one."

Thornell's fascination with the family history continued. He wrote a fifth-grade class paper on Vashon. And nearly 10 years later, Thornell - then a student at the University of Pennsylvania - wrote a senior thesis on his ancestors.

The thesis was published in the fall 1998 issue of a scholarly publication, the Journal of Negro History, under the title "The Absent Ones and The Providers: A Biography of the Vashons."

"I give full credit to my nephew for enlightening me," Atkinson said. "It became a story of great interest, especially because he was denied admittance to the bar. It was my belief that somehow, something should be done about it."

Atkinson soon began to work on gaining Vashon's posthumous admission to the bar. He didn't realize that, across the state in Pittsburgh, longtime civil rights activist and lawyer Wendell Freeland was doing the same thing.

Freeland, 85 - a veteran of World War II's famed Tuskegee Airmen - had read of Vashon, too, in a 2007 article in Pennsylvania Lawyer magazine.

Moved by the injustices Vashon had faced, Freeland began writing to the state Supreme Court to argue for Vashon's admission. He also contacted the magazine article's author, Wink Twyman, and made connections with Thornell and then Atkinson. They eventually joined forces on the Vashon petition.

It was filed in 2009, and in May the court unanimously voted to grant the posthumous certificate.

"I saw his record, and his record is phenomenal for anybody in those days," Castille said.

"It's symbolism, but we are trying to right an ancient wrong that can never truly be compensated for," the chief justice said. "But we voted unanimously, because we felt it was important that we recognize this sorry chapter in Pennsylvania history."

On Wednesday morning, Castille and the other justices are scheduled to walk into their Pittsburgh courtroom in full ceremonial attire. Castille is to read Vashon's admission into the record. A local judge and the president-elect of the Allegheny County Bar Association will speak.

The poetic justice of all this is not lost on Vashon's nephew or his great-grandson, both of whom will be at the ceremony. Thornell noted that the petitioners succeeded by making a case to the same institutions that once stood in Vashon's path.

"I had certain good fortunes in the 20th century that he didn't have in the 19th century," Atkinson said. "I'm very reluctant to say that what I have done in my career can begin to be measured against his. I'm just happy to stand in his footsteps."