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Roderick B. Thomas came to Arkansas, probably from Alabama, about 1885. He practiced law about two years in Little Rock (Pulaski County) with Black attorney Mifflin Gibbs. Thomas was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on December 26,1848, and moved with his family to Selma (Dallas County), Alabama, where he was educated. He was elected clerk of the Dallas County criminal court in 1869, and to the Selma City Council in 1873. In 1874, he was elected judge of the criminal court in Selma (thus becoming the first Black judge in Alabama), but was evicted shortly thereafter when the court was abolished after Democrats regained electoral power in the state in 1874. Two years later, after marrying a local schoolteacher, Thomas left the state. Nothing is known about him between 1876 and 1885. He was said to have formed a law partnership with Mifflin W. Gibbs in Arkansas in 1885. Roderick Thomas died on November 16, 1887. Upon his death, the Little Rock Bar (both white and black lawyers) passed a resolution commending “the high qualities which distinguished him as a man, and of the ability and untarnished integrity so conspicuous in all that pertained to his profession.” Gibbs, then a judge of the chancery court, T.J. Oliphant and F.T. Vaughan drafted the resolution, which was placed in the record of all Arkansas courts.
Sources: Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction 85 (1993); “Roderick B. Thomas” (obituary), 11/17/1887, Arkansas Gazette;