Knocking at the Bar

Dec. 25, 1907
Los Angeles

There are precisely two African American attorneys in Los Angeles and their appearance against one another in court provides a bit of amusement for The Times. We can dispense with the news article and its unfortunate use of dialect rather quickly: Paul M. Nash was suing G.T. Crawford, an African American waiter, for attorneys fees after representing his wife in a divorce. Crawford was represented by Charles S. Darden.

Like most mainstream newspapers of the period, The Times rarely wrote about African Americans and stories always identified them as:

Larry Harnish

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One thought on “Knocking at the Bar”

  1. There were more than two “coloredâ€Â attorneys in L.A. in this period, Gustavus Woodson Wickliffe being one of them. He was married on July 3, 1901, to the former Minnie Mitchell, an 1892 graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio. According to https://www.oberlin-high.org/obits/ohs_obits_w.html, he died in 1921; she died in 1960. They were survived by a daughter, Mrs. Caroline Wickliffe Antoine of Washington, D.C., and a son, Gustavus Woodson Wickliff, of Los Angeles.

    George Garrigues

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