John G. Browning (Spencer Fane LLP), Righting Past Wrongs: Posthumous Bar Admissions and the Quest for Racial Justice, 21 Berkeley J. Afr.-Am. L. & Pol'y 1 (2021)
At the dawn of the 21st century, a presumably more enlightened American society began acknowledging painful episodes from its past and taking steps to address these lingering legacies of shame. In 2005, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution apologizing for its decades-old failure to make lynching a federal crime. In 2011, Congress officially apologized for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and other laws spawned by anti-Chinese bigotry. On a more individualized level in 2013, the governor of Alabama pardoned the three remaining Scottsboro Boys who had not already been exonerated for that 1931 miscarriage of justice; two years later, the governor of Delaware posthumously pardoned Samuel Burris, a free Black man and conductor on the Underground Railroad convicted in 1847 of helping slaves escape. In the world of higher education, schools like the University of Texas removed Confederate statues from their campuses, while Georgetown announced plans to raise $400,000 a year to fund reparations for the descendants of 272 slaves sold by the school in 1838.
And recently, a University of California, Berkeley, School of Law committee coordinated the removal of references to John Henry Boalt from campus buildings (such as Boalt Hall) because of the 19th century mining magnate’s virulent anti-Chinese and anti-Black writings.
But what of aspiring lawyers who had met all requirements for admission to the bar (and in certain areas were lawyers in other states) but were denied a law license because of their race? African Americans, for example, faced daunting hurdles not only in obtaining a legal education in the first place, but in gaining admission to practice in an era when that achievement depended on the approval of a presiding judge and oral examination before a committee of local lawyers. John N. Johnson, the first African American admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of Texas, was denied admission by such local panels the first two times he applied to the bar before finally succeeding on his third try. To date, there have been six documented cases of individuals who were unjustly denied entry into the legal profession on racial grounds, but who ultimately were posthumously admitted to the bar: Japanese American Takuji Yamashita in 2001 in Washington state ; African American George B. Vashon in 2010 in Pennsylvania ; Chinese American Hong Yen Chang in 2013 in California; Japanese American Sei Fujii in 2017 in California; African American William Herbert Johnson in 2019 in New York; and African American J.H. Williams in 2020 in Texas.
This Article will examine the struggles experienced by each of these trailblazing individuals for whom vindication would eventually come, in some instances, over a century too late. It will also discuss the steps taken to bring some measure of justice, however belated, to remove the tarnish from the memories of these legal pioneers, and to place their respective legacies in perspective. Equally important to this discussion are the questions of the value of and lessons learned from such posthumous bar admissions. Are they merely symbolic coda to some of the most regrettable chapters in American history, or can they represent meaningful steps toward racial healing?
