Samuel Wilbert Tucker (June 18, 1913 – October 19, 1990) was an American lawyer and a cooperating attorney with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His civil rights career began as he organized a 1939 sit-in at the then-segregated Alexandria, Virginia public library. A partner in the Richmond, Virginia, firm of Hill, Tucker and Marsh (formerly Hill, Martin and Robinson), Tucker argued and won several civil rights cases before the Supreme Court of the United States, including Green v. County School Board of New Kent County which, according to The Encyclopedia of Civil Rights In America, "did more to advance school integration than any other Supreme Court decision since Brown."
Early life and education
Tucker was born in Alexandria, Virginia, on June 18, 1913. His father, Samuel A. Tucker, a real estate agent and NAACP member, and teacher mother saw to his formal and informal education.J. Douglas Smith, Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 2002) p. 260 Tucker later said: "I got involved in the civil rights movement on June 18, 1913, in Alexandria. I was born black." Although Alexandria was less segregated than Richmond and Norfolk, it provided no high school for black children, so after graduating from 8th grade, he had to "bootleg" a high school education across the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., at Armstrong High School. Black Virginia children commuted by streetcar. In June 1927, when Tucker was 14, he, 2 brothers and a friend refused to leave their seats after a streetcar crossed the river into Alexandria, despite the request of a white woman who believed one of the seats was designated only for whites. She swore out a warrant charging them with disorderly conduct and abusive language, and the police levied no fine upon the 11 year old Otto Tucker, but fined Samuel Tucker $5 plus court costs and his older brother George $50 plus court costs, claiming that as eldest he should have known better. However, on appeal, an all-white jury found the young men not guilty.Smith at pp. 260-261
Tucker began drafting deeds to help his father at an early age, and also began reading the law books of Tom Watson, a lawyer who shared an office with the senior Tucker. Samuel attended Howard University whose chaplain Howard Thurman had become an outspoken proponent of Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent resistance strategy and where Charles Houston established the nation's first program in civil rights law.Smith at p. 261 He earned his undergraduate degree in 1933. Tucker soon qualified for the Virginia bar exam based on his studies in Watson's law office, but had to wait until June 1934, when he reached age 21, to begin practicing law. After two years with the Civilian Conservation Corps, Tucker and his friend George Wilson (a retired army sergeant) began in earnest dismantling segregation in Alexandria, first at the public library opened just 2 blocks from his home in August 1937, but which refused to issue cards to black residents.
Legal career At 14-years old, he had had a run-in with the law because a white woman accused him and his brothers of refusing to yield his seat in a "whites only" part of the trolley.Sullivan, WAPOST 2014, mid article He was defended by a lawyer named Thomas Watson, who knew Tucker because he routinely ran errands for Watson and organized papers for him. Perkins, ALEXTIMES 2014, under "overshadowed but not forgotten Tucker was admitted to the state bar in 1934, ironically in the same courtroom where a jury had acquitted him of the trolley car incident which occurred in 1927, and began practicing in Alexandria.
Alexandria Library sit-in
In 1939, Tucker organized a sit-in at Alexandria Library, which refused to issue library cards to black residents. It had opened two years previously, replacing a previous whites-only subscription library that had been housed in a former home for Confederate veterans. Also, while the District of Columbia had built an integrated public library decades earlier with funds donated by Andrew Carnegie (and which Tucker had often visited, as he did a Black subscription library also in the District), the City of Alexandria had long ago refused similar funds, though Andrew Carnegie had lived and worked in Alexandria during the American Civil War, before making his fortune. As a condition for their critical donation (which supplemented federal funds from the Public Works Administration and labor from the Works Progress Administration), the family of Kate Waller Barrett, insisted the City of Alexandria commit to funding the library's operating expenses. Thus monies from Black taxpayers were used to fund the library, although Tucker had previously shown that the library refused cards to Black prospective patrons.
On August 21, 1939, five young black men whom Tucker had recruited and instructed – William Evans, Otto L. Tucker, Edward Gaddis, Morris Murray, and Clarence Strange – entered the library one by one, requested applications for library cards and, when refused, each one took a book off the shelf and sat down in the reading room until they were removed by the police. Tucker had instructed the men to dress well, speak politely and offer no resistance to the police so as to minimize the chance of the men being found guilty of disorderly conduct or resisting arrest. Tucker defended the men in the ensuing legal actions, which resulted in the disorderly conduct charges against the protestors being dropped by city attorney Armistead Boothe (who would later become a key figure in desegregating Virginia schools), and in a branch library being established for blacks.
While the sit-in received a four-paragraph story in the local Alexandria Gazette newspaper and brief mention in the Washington Post, the Chicago Defender ran the story on its front page accompanied by a photograph of the arrest, noting that the protest was being viewed as a "test case" in Virginia. Other African-American newspapers covered the legal action, reporting such developments as Tucker's cross-examination of the police, bringing forth an admission that had the men been white they would not have been arrested under similar circumstances. While Tucker succeeded in defending the sit-in participants, he was not satisfied with the separate but equal resolution of creating a new branch library, the Robert H. Robinson Library, for blacks. In a 1940 letter to the librarian of the whites-only library, Tucker stated that he would refuse to accept a card to the new blacks-only branch library in lieu of a card to be used at the existing library.
The photograph of the sit-in participants in jackets and ties calmly but resolutely being escorted from the library by uniformed police has itself become a learning aid in Alexandria. Periodically, the city has commemorated the sit-in and used it as a teaching opportunity about the Jim Crow segregation era, with students from Samuel W. Tucker Elementary donning similar attire, acting out the sit-in events and posing in recreations of the photograph.
Wartime service, then move to Emporia World War II interrupted his fledgling legal practice. Tucker entered the army and served in the 366th Infantry, which saw combat in Italy. Tucker rose to the rank of major.
As World War II ended, the Virginia State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had W. Lester Banks as executive secretary, Dr. Jesse M. Tinsley of Richmond and later E. B. Henderson of Falls Church as president, and Oliver W. Hill, Martin A. Martin and Spottswood Robinson as attorneys (the latter as liaison to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund). Tucker had returned to Alexandria but decided it had too many black lawyers, so he moved his law practice to Emporia, Virginia, in the heart of Southside Virginia.
There, Tucker was the only black lawyer. There were neither black judges nor black jurors. The white legal establishment in Greensville County often did not appreciate Tucker's criminal defense tactics, which attacked not only the evidence against his poor black clients, but racial imbalance in the system itself. For example, Tucker defended Jodie Bailey who, after drinking, stabbed the popular white proprietor of an automobile repair business during a charge dispute, and the man died. With NAACP help, Tucker established that in the previous three decades, no trial jury in Greensville County had included any black jurors. The Virginia Supreme Court overturned Bailey's conviction, but ordered a new trial, where he was convicted again. Tucker also used a statistical argument in helping Martin A. Martin appeal the death sentences of the "Martinsville Seven". However, state and federal judges rejected the argument that since 1908 Virginia had executed 45 black men for raping white women, yet had executed no white man convicted of rape, so several clients were executed.
Cooperating attorney for the NAACP under fire As the Civil Rights Movement developed during the postwar era, Tucker came to have a central role in its legal battles in Virginia. He ultimately filed suits in nearly 50 counties, including Alexandria and neighboring Arlington and Fairfax. By the time Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954 and 1955, the NAACP state legal staff had grown to a dozen cooperating attorneys (including Tucker), and had filed fifteen petitions requesting desegregation with local school boards by the spring of 1956.Brian J. Daugherity, Keep on Keeping On (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016) p. 46 However, U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd had vowed Massive Resistance to school desegregation, and that fall a special session of the Virginia General Assembly adopted (and Governor Thomas B. Stanley signed) a package of new laws to maintain segregation and close desegregating schools, which came to be known as the "Stanley Plan." That collection of bills also contained seven relating to NAACP activities, and expanded the definitions of the common law legal ethics offenses of barratry, champerty and maintenance.