Belford Lawson Jr.

Belford Vance Lawson Jr. (July 9, 1901 – February 23, 1985) was an American attorney and civil rights activist who made at least eight appearances before the U.S. Supreme Court. He was the first African-American man to win a case before the Supreme Court and the first African-American president of YMCA.[1][2]

Belford Lawson Jr.
Born(1901-07-09)July 9, 1901
Roanoke, Virginia, United States
DiedFebruary 23, 1985(1985-02-23) (aged 83)
Washington, D.C.
Alma materHoward University
Yale Law School
University of Michigan
OccupationLawyer
Known forNew Negro Alliance v. Sanitary Grocery Co.
President of Alpha Phi Alpha
President of the YMCA

Early life

Belford Lawson was born and grew up in Roanoke, Virginia. He attended the University of Michigan and was the school's second African-American varsity football player (having been preceded by George Jewett in the 1890s). He was the only African American on the varsity during Fielding H. Yost's coaching tenure.[3][4][5][6]

In 1924, after graduating from Michigan, Lawson was hired as the head football coach and athletic director at Jackson College (now known as Jackson State University), a historically black college in Jackson, Mississippi, the state capital. He also served as a professor of social science and the director of the Teachers' Professional Department.[7] In Lawson's three years as the head football coach at Jackson College, the team compiled a record of 0–3 and was outscored 54 to 0.[8]

Lawson was reported to have held a position as a professor of economics at Morris Brown College in Atlanta, Georgia. The college's president John Lewis, a Yale University graduate, was instrumental in Lawson being accepted to Yale Law School. Lawson completed his degree at Howard University School of Law, where he received his J.D. in 1932.[1][9]

Career

In 1933, Lawson founded the New Negro Alliance (NNA) in Washington, D.C., along with John A. Davis Sr. and M. Franklin Thorne, to challenge white-owned businesses in black neighborhoods that would not hire black employees.[10] The NNA instituted a Don't Buy Where You Can't Work campaign, considered radical at the time, and organized or threatened boycotts against white-owned businesses that did not hire blacks. In response, some businesses arranged for an injunction to stop the picketing. Lawson, the lead attorney, with assistance by Thurgood Marshall, fought back – all the way to the United States Supreme Court in New Negro Alliance v. Sanitary Grocery Co. (1938). The court ruled that the organization and residents had a right to boycott.[11] This became a landmark case in the struggle by African Americans against discriminatory hiring practices. Don't Buy Where You Can't Work groups multiplied throughout the nation. The NNA estimated that by 1940, the group had secured 5,106 jobs for blacks because businesses could not afford to lose sales of black customers during the Great Depression.[12]

In 1934, Lawson encouraged National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) special counsel Charles Houston to authorize Thurgood Marshall to file the case of Murray v. Maryland (1935) to challenge the state law requiring segregation in the University of Maryland School of Law. Marshall won the case, and Donald Murray was admitted to the university's law school.

Lawson was part of the legal team that won Henderson v. Southern Railway Company (1950), challenging the Interstate Commerce Commission's approval of railroad racial segregation practices. The lawsuit resulted in the abolition of segregation in railroad dining cars.[1]

Lawson was the 16th General President of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Greek letter organization established by African Americans.[13] The fraternity sponsors an annual Belford V. Lawson Oratorical Contest. Collegiate members compete in oratorical skills at the chapter level, with the winner competing at the state, regional, and general conventions. The fraternity says "the purpose of the Belford V. Lawson Oratorical Contest is to identify problems or special topics of interest within society and determine how the problem or topic relates to the goals and objectives of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated."[14] Lawson rented the third floor of his Logan Circle home to fraternity brother Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a US Representative (D-NY), during Powell's tenure in Congress.[15][16]

In 1973, Lawson was elected President of YMCA of the USA. He continued to be active in law and civic activities but reduced his activities in later years. He died in Washington, D.C., in 1985, after having battled Alzheimer's disease and cancer.[1][2]

gollark: I simply type very fast.
gollark: An alternative to using CD or USB images for installation is to use the static version of the package manager Pacman, from within another Linux-based operating system. The user can mount their newly formatted drive partition, and use pacstrap (or Pacman with the appropriate command-line switch) to install base and additional packages with the mountpoint of the destination device as the root for its operations. This method is useful when installing Arch Linux onto USB flash drives, or onto a temporarily mounted device which belongs to another system. Regardless of the selected installation type, further actions need to be taken before the new system is ready for use, most notably by installing a bootloader and configuring the new system with a system name, network connection, language settings, and graphical user interface. The installation images come packaged with an experimental command line installer, archinstall, which can assist with installing Arch Linux.
gollark: Arch is largely based on binary packages. Packages target x86-64 microprocessors to assist performance on modern hardware. A ports/ebuild-like system is also provided for automated source compilation, known as the Arch Build System. Arch Linux focuses on simplicity of design, meaning that the main focus involves creating an environment that is straightforward and relatively easy for the user to understand directly, rather than providing polished point-and-click style management tools — the package manager, for example, does not have an official graphical front-end. This is largely achieved by encouraging the use of succinctly commented, clean configuration files that are arranged for quick access and editing. This has earned it a reputation as a distribution for "advanced users" who are willing to use the command line. The Arch Linux website supplies ISO images that can be run from CD or USB. After a user partitions and formats their drive, a simple command line script (pacstrap) is used to install the base system. The installation of additional packages which are not part of the base system (for example, desktop environments), can be done with either pacstrap, or Pacman after booting (or chrooting) into the new installation.
gollark: On March 2021, Arch Linux developers were thinking of porting Arch Linux packages to x86_64-v3. x86-64-v3 roughly correlates to Intel Haswell era of processors.
gollark: The migration to systemd as its init system started in August 2012, and it became the default on new installations in October 2012. It replaced the SysV-style init system, used since the distribution inception. On 24 February 2020, Aaron Griffin announced that due to his limited involvement with the project, he would, after a voting period, transfer control of the project to Levente Polyak. This change also led to a new 2-year term period being added to the Project Leader position. The end of i686 support was announced in January 2017, with the February 2017 ISO being the last one including i686 and making the architecture unsupported in November 2017. Since then, the community derivative Arch Linux 32 can be used for i686 hardware.

References
  1. Company, Johnson Publishing (March 11, 1985). "Rites for Belford Lawson, 1st Black Atty. in U.S. To Win Supreme Court Case". Jet. Chicago, Illinois: Johnson Publishing Company. 67 (26): 5. ISSN 0021-5996. Retrieved November 28, 2009.
  2. "Belford Lawson, Retired Lawyer, Is Dead at 83". The Washington Post. February 24, 1985. pp. B8. Retrieved November 28, 2009.
  3. "1921 Michigan football team roster". Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. Archived from the original on September 30, 2011. Retrieved December 13, 2011.
  4. "1922 Michigan football team roster". Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. Archived from the original on February 18, 2012.
  5. "1923 Michigan football team roster". Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. Archived from the original on August 19, 2010.
  6. James Tobin (October 2009). "The Belford Lawson Mystery". Ann Arbor Chronicle.
  7. "Tiger Football History". Jackson State University. Archived from the original on August 5, 2012.
  8. "B.V. Lawson Records by Year". College Football Data Warehouse.
  9. Mason, Herman (1999). "Belford Vance Lawson". The Talented Tenth: The Founders and Presidents of Alpha (2nd ed.). Winter Park, FL: Four-G. ISBN 1-885066-63-5.
  10. "New Negro Alliance's Sanitary Grocery Protest Site". Cultural Tourism DC. Archived from the original on December 5, 2007. Retrieved April 17, 2009.
  11. "NEW NEGRO ALLIANCE v. SANITARY GROCERY CO". findlaw.com. Retrieved January 5, 2008.
  12. "New Negro Alliance's Sanitary Grocery Protest Site". Cultural Tourism DC. Archived from the original on December 5, 2007. Retrieved January 5, 2008.
  13. Parks, Gregory S. (2008). Black Greek-Letter Organizations in the Twenty-First Century: Our Fight Has Just Begun. Foreword by Julianne Malveaux; Afterword by Marc Morial. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky. pp. 148. ISBN 978-0-8131-2491-9.
  14. "Belford V. Lawson Oratorical Contest" (PDF). Awards and Achievements Criteria Handbook. Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity: 19–23. Archived from the original (PDF) on February 28, 2008. Retrieved January 5, 2008.
  15. "Belford V. Lawson and Marjorie M. Lawson Residence". Cultural Tourism DC. Archived from the original on March 11, 2007. Retrieved January 5, 2008.
  16. Williams, Paul Kelsey (2001). Images of America: The Neighborhoods of Logan, Scott, and Thomas Circles. Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing. p. 30. ISBN 978-0-7385-1404-8.
Preceded by
Rayford Logan		 General President of Alpha Phi Alpha
1946–1951		 Succeeded by
Antonio M. Smith
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