William F. Yardley

Biography

Yardley was born in 1844 to an Irish mother and a black father, making him free by birth. His mother left him on the doorstep of the Yardley family, a white family who gave him his name and raised him. Out of five candidates in the election, Yardley placed fourth, with less than one percent of the vote.

In 1885, he is believed to have become the first African American attorney to appear before the Tennessee Supreme Court when he argued against a practice that required jail inmates to work to pay for the costs of their prosecution. He lost the case, but the practice was abolished in later years.

In October 1919, Yardley served on the defense team in the high-profile trial of local mulatto Maurice Mays, who had been accused of murdering a white woman. The murder had sparked the Knoxville Riot of 1919, one of the city's worst racial incidents, in August of that year. Mays was eventually found guilty and executed, though there was virtually no evidence linking him to the crime.