T
he Loyola
University Chicago
School of Law
graduation on
June 10, 1925 was
different from its
predecessors. Among the graduates
receiving their LLB degrees was Leroy
J. Knox, the law school’s first African
American graduate. Thus 2015 marks
the 90th anniversary of this milestone
within the law school. (Also receiving
their law degrees at that ceremony
were the first women graduates; their
story will be told in a future issue of
Loyola Law
.)
Loyola’s law school had been
established in 1908 as an evening
law school to bring professional
legal education to working men
who could not afford or would not
be admitted to established full-time
law schools. The appointment of
Frederic Siedenburg, S.J., as the law
school’s regent (the active liaison
between the University and its
professional schools) in 1921 led to
a series of changes.
Father Siedenburg encouraged
the administration and faculty to
establish a three-year full-time day
division and to standardize the
longstanding evening curriculum into
a four-year program. He apparently
provided the initiative to expand and
diversify the student body as well.
Those measures paid off as Knox and
the women joined the law student
body and persevered to receive their
law degrees by 1925.
While African Americans had
been present in Chicago from its
start—indeed, the first permanent
settler who was not Native American
was Jean Baptiste Point du Sable,
thought to have been Haitian—they
constituted a relatively small portion
of the city’s population until the
Great Migration after WorldWar I
brought southern African Americans
to jobs in Chicago and elsewhere in
the North. But there had been African
American lawyers in Chicago since
1869, and several Chicago law schools
accepted African American students
at an early date.
Like most law school applicants
of that era, Knox came to Loyola
in September 1923 without an
undergraduate degree; he had
studied at Northwestern before
applying to law school. Loyola
required only two years of
undergraduate study at that time;
it was not until 1935 that a third
year of undergraduate work
became required.
BY PROFESSOR THOMAS M. HANEY
The number of African American
graduates at Loyola stayed very small
for some time—only two others
received their LLB degrees in the ‘20s:
Austin D. Farrell and Leo H. Simms,
both in 1927. In that same year,
Edith L. Sampson earned an LLM in
Loyola’s new graduate law program—
the only African American woman
to earn her LLM in the history of the
original LLM program.
Increasing numbers
The number of African American
graduates increased in the 1930s
and into the 1940s, despite the
Depression. Among the graduates
were Timothy W. Adams in 1933;
Shelley Luster in 1934; Archie W. Mills,
Poindexter A. Orr, and Elyseo J. Taylor,
all in 1935; Ulysses S. Keys and Edward
B. Toles in 1936; Clarice M. Hatcher
in 1938, the first African American
woman to earn a first law degree at
Loyola; and Sylvanus A. Ballard in
1941. At that time, the law school
closed for a few years because of the
demands of WorldWar II.
To put the small number of
African American graduates in
perspective, it should be noted that
the school as a whole was small in
those years, typically graduating only
between 35 and 45 students each
year. Loyola was the smallest of all
the law schools in Chicago for much
of its history. In addition, throughout
the ‘30s and into the ‘40s, the law
school pursued a rigorous policy of
dismissing students who failed to
achieve the required grades to ensure
that only truly qualified students
would go on to enter the profession.
Records from that era are few,
but what we do know is that, in these
early decades, African American
students seem to have participated in
the life of the law school—although,
given their small numbers, probably
with some feelings of isolation. Austin
Farrell was president of the Day Law
Student Council in 1927. In 1936,
Ulysses Keys and a classmate,
Evelyn McIntyre, won the Brandeis
Moot Court Competition, the
school’s intramural competition.
Much of the publicity surrounding
that victory seemed to focus on a
woman being on the winning team,
rather than on Keys’s race. Sylvanus
Ballard graduated third in his class
of 25 in 1941.
On to distinguished
careers
Many of these early graduates
went on to distinguished careers.
Edward Toles, for example, served as
AFRICAN AMERICAN DIVERSITY
(CONTINUED FROM PAGE 17)
Leroy J. Knox (LLB ’25)
Austin D. Farrell (LLB ’27)
Clarice M. Hatcher (LLB ’38)
Ulysses S. Keys (LLB ’36)
Donald L. Hollowell (LLB ’51, left) is congratulated by Anthony E. Simpkins (JD ’94)
at a 1993 Black Law Students Association dinner.
18
LOYOLA LAW
SPRING 2015
19
