An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted 12/15/2020
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"I got involved in the civil rights movement on June 18, 1913, in Alexandria: I was born black."
The trajectory of attorney Samuel Wilbert Tucker could more properly be said to have begun at the age of 14, when he and his brother were denied seats on a streetcar in his hometown of Alexandria, VA. He earned his law degree from Howard University in 1933 and passed the bar the following year, returning to his hometown to practice. His first significant civil rights involvement came in 1939, when he organized a quiet, polite sit-in at the local public library (which at that time denied library cards to Black residents). The ensuing court case resulted in an acquittal and a much more widespread national attention to segregation.
After a pause in his legal career during WWII, during which he served in the famed all-Black 366th Infantry, Tucker established a partnership with Richmond attorney Oliver Hill (see Lesson #45 in this series), and continued to pursue cases on behalf of the NAACP, most of which involved desegregation --a caseload that did not come without consequences; five times the Virginia State Bar association attempted to disbar Tucker. Undeterred, Tucker took on a central role in arguing Green v. County School Board of New Kent County before the Supreme Court, which revolved around the rights of counties to transfer white students to private academies at public expense --essentially an end run around the desegregation requirements already settled by Brown v. Board of Education. The court sided with Tucker, and a longstanding practice of deliberate foot-dragging against desegregation was sped up.
Tucker twice ran for Congress (1964 and 1968) but failed to attract enough support in Virginia's 4th District, where pro-segregationist sentiment would continue to carry the day. He died in 1990 but leaves behind an impressive legacy that is only now beginning to be rediscovered. The "blacks-only" public library against which he had so effectively argued, is today the Alexandria Black History Museum, and the Virginia Bar Association that once fought so hard dismiss him from practice, now sponsors the Oliver Hill/Samuel Tucker Prelaw Institute as an outreach opportunity to future lawyers.
Learn more at: https://www.alexandriava.gov/historic/blackhistory/default.aspx?id=73256
Next page - Lesson 61: Daisy Bates