Home | Background | Lawyers | Wiley Austin Branton | Contact
I(saiah) H. Spears was reported in practice in El Dorado (Union County), Arkansas in 1938. He had graduated from Howard University’s School of Law in 1908. At that time, he was a member of the Wonder State Bar Association, a Black lawyers group. A reference places him in practice previously in Tulsa, Oklahoma, about the time of the May 1921 “Race Riot.” After the fires that burned the city’s thriving Black community, Spears and two other attorneys, practiced law in a tent as Spears, Franklin & Chappelle. They moved into a permanent office on Greenwood Street in November 1921. The trio’s most notable case, among many on behalf of riot victims, involved a successful challenge to an ordinance of the Tulsa City Commission that would have made rebuilding the area significantly more expensive for Blacks. There is some suggestion that Spears moved to California at some point. Nothing more is known about him.
Sources: Judith Kilpatrick, “(EXTRA)Ordinary Men: African-American Lawyers and Civil Rights in Arkansas Before 1950,” 53 Ark. Law Rev. 299, 381 n630, 388, 394 (2000); Buck Colbert Franklin, My Life and an Era (1997); Hannibal B. Johnson, Black Wall Street 68, 69, 94, 95, 96, 104, 232 (1998); Alfred L. Brophy, Reconstructing the Dreamland, The Tulsa Riot of 1921, 23, 28 (2002); Class List, Howard University School of Law, Library Archives; e-mail from Lea Cash with mention of I.H. Spears;