McCants Stewart

McCants Stewart (July 11, 1877 – April 14, 1919) was an African-American lawyer. Born to a prominent attorney in New York, Stewart studied law in Minnesota and became the first African American lawyer in the state of Oregon. His lack of financial success in Oregon led him to eventually move to San Francisco, where failing vision led him to commit suicide. Living in the era of Plessy v. Ferguson and "separate but equal" doctrine, his life was said to "reflect an unyielding commitment to the principle of justice for all powerless people in the northwest."

Biography

Early years Born in Brooklyn, New York, Stewart was the eldest son of T. McCants Stewart (1853–1923), a noted black lawyer, civil rights leader and confidant of Booker T. Washington, whose career took him from South Carolina to New York City, Hawaii, London to serving as an Associate Justice of the Liberian Supreme Court, and Charlotte L. Harris Stewart, herself a graduate of Wilberforce University. His father's friendship with Washington began before the latter rose to national prominence with the 1895 Atlanta Compromise speech, and the elder Stewart embraced Washington's principles of thrift, self-help and moral reform, instilling those values on his three children at an early age. His brother, Gilchrist, would also become and attorney and his sister, Carlotta Stewart Lai, would help develop Hawaii's public education system. Stewart attended public schools in New York.

At age sixteen, and at their father's request, Stewart and his brother enrolled at Washington's Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1893. In its twelfth year, the black college stressed industrial education with strong principles of self-reliance in a strict environment. Stewart did not immediately accept the school's rigid structure, and rebelled in ways that brought the increasing displeasure of Washington.

Stewart received an LL.B. in 1899. He set up a legal practice in the Twin Cities, however he also continued working for the newspapers to help finance his continuing education at the Law School. It was during this time he met his future wife, Mary Delia "Mayme" Weir of Minneapolis, who was a student at the University of Minnesota. In 1901, he became the first African American to receive an LL.M. from the University of Minnesota Law School.

In the years immediately following his graduation, Stewart continued to make his home in Minneapolis and speak to crowds in the Twin Cities. An active member of the Republican Party, he was elected Secretary of the Hennepin County Republican Club in 1902. However, he began testing the market out west and by March 1904 he had decided that it made more business sense to practice law elsewhere and decided to permanently move to Portland, Oregon. He returned to Minneapolis several times after moving, most notably to marry on August 22, 1905. His wife was a graduate of the University of Minnesota and a music school, and had been a teacher in the Minneapolis public school system. Their only child, daughter Mary Katherine, was born a year later. Like the Twin Cities, Portland's black community was small when Stewart permanently settled there in 1904. Most African Americans were service workers or unskilled, menial laborers, though there were some black-owned businesses. Stewart's father was disappointed in his son's decision to move to Portland, noting "But for the life of me, I can't see why you are 'using up' your life where you are", suggesting his son try moving abroad like he had.

After setting up his office in Portland, Stewart struggled to make a decent living. The black population of Oregon remained below 1% of the state's total population until World War II. Race relations of the time dictated that white Oregonians rarely hired black attorneys, and the even smaller number of educated, wealthy blacks did not offer much of a market. He began using a prosthetic leg made out of cork. On April 14, 1919, unable to read his morning newspaper and fearing that he was about to go blind, Stewart wrote a note of farewell and shot himself in the head in his office. His body was found the following day by a business associate. His suicide note said: "I am going blind. My sight is gone. I can't see to read. Poor Mac. I can't stand it any longer, so I cashed in."

Legacy Stewart achieved several firsts for African Americans: he was the first to become an Oregon lawyer, the first to argue and the first to win a case before the Oregon Supreme Court, and the first to receive an LL.M. from the University of Minnesota Law School. In 1988, the University of Minnesota Law School awarded a Mary and McCants Stewart Foundation scholarship. During its inauguration, J. Clay Smith, Jr., former dean of the Howard University School of Law, noted that "Despite the ominous shadow of segregation, Stewart refused to sacrifice his principles at the expense of his clients or to derogate his beliefs." She gave interviews regarding her relatives well into the 1980s.