Segregation prevents a black lawyer from practicing law
Beavers remembers "Chalk Eye," the first African American to earn a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Segregated prevented him from practicing law, however, and he earned money giving legal advice.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Leroy Beavers, August 8, 2002. Interview R-0170. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
Then we had one man. I'm going to call him
Chalk Eye. He was one of the first black men to go to University of
Pennsylvania Law School and got a law degree but couldn't
practice law.
- KIERAN TAYLOR:
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Because of segregation.
- LEROY BEAVERS, JR.:
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Because of segregation and the only thing he could do was be like maybe
I guess a paralegal, what you want to call it a paralegal, give legal
advice to blacks around and did taxes, everybody taxes from whoever had
taxes to be done, whoever had jobs had to get taxes done. I remember
him, and he would sit and tell me about, I try to figure out how in the
hell did he get to go to the University of Pennsylvania. He went to the
University of Pennsylvania in the '40s, in the early
'40s and graduated, and then he turned out to be just one of
the biggest alcoholics of all times, that hurt. What made him go that,
what did him like this here.