with their pupils and stressed that white teachers could not help black students develop positive
self concepts. The party in power paid attention to the demands of the black community because
it sought segregation. By 1907 all white teachers had been shifted to the white schools.16

The absence of any challenge in court to segregation in schools has a variety of
explanations. The basic struggle was to have some school, not equality. Given the starting point
in which the needs of the black community for education were strongest at the primary level,
there was a general acceptance of the propriety of establishing separate schools. Education was a
privilege that could be granted or withheld by the state, rather than a fundamental concern like
life, liberty or property. Challenges under the equal protection clause focused on deprivations of
natural rights rather than governmental allocations of resources. Judicial decisions in northern
states had upheld segregated schools - as the Supreme Court noted in Plessy.

£..        Admission to the Bar

Prior to the civil war, Maryland statutes restricted the practice of law to white males.
Nevertheless, in 1857 Judge Zachias Collins Lee of the Baltimore Superior Court examined
Edward Garrison Draper, a black graduate of Dartmouth College who had studied law in the
offices of a retired Baltimore lawyer, for his knowledge of law. Judge Lee furnished Draper with
a certificate attesting that he was "qualified in all respects to be admitted to the bar in Maryland,
if he was a free white citizen." The purpose of the certificate was to enable Draper to establish a
legal practice in Liberia, but he died in 1858 before his career could truly begin.

Two decades after Draper received his certificate, the racial barriers in Maryland to the
practice of law remained. The federal courts were open to black lawyers, but, despite the
adoption of the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments, the state courts were closed. James Harris
Wolff came to Washington for a short period after his graduation from Harvard Law School in
1875. He became the first black attorney admitted to practice in federal courts in Maryland.
Another black lawyer from Massachusetts who had been admitted to the federal bar in Maryland,
Charles S. Taylor, sought to settle in this state. He applied for admission to the bar of the
Maryland Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals, however, had a different view of the impact
of the civil war amendments on the statutory racial barrier to the practice of law. Like Judge
Giles in Cully, the Maryland court reasoned that The Slaughterhouse Cases stripped the
fourteenth amendment of any application to "privileges" of state citizen;ship. Membership in the
bar, like travel on a public carrier, was not a matter of life, liberty or property, but simply a
privilege which the state could afford. "The 14th amendment has no application," it held in the
1877 decision In re Taylor.'7

Several attempts to repeal the offending statute failed, but in 1885 Reverend Harvey
Johnson spearheaded a successful attempt to get the courts to overturn the racial restriction. He
found Charles Wilson, a Massachusetts lawyer who had moved to Maryland to teach school, to
act as the plaintiff. On March 19, 1885 in re Wilson, the Supreme Bench of Baltimore
unanimously held that the racial restriction was unconstitutional.18 The Court reasoned that the

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