Attorneys Law in Greenville County by Judith T. Bainbridge

Attorneys Law in Greenville County by Judith T. Bainbridge

Author:Judith T. Bainbridge [Bainbridge, Judith T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Photography, Subjects & Themes, Historical, Regional, Travel, Pictorials, History, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV)
ISBN: 9781625856593
Google: VrZxCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2015-10-05T05:06:09+00:00


John Bolt Culbertson in a reflective mood. Courtesy Manning Culbertson.

From that day until his death in 1983, he was a flamboyant player in the state’s law and politics. In appearance—his bow tie, flowing locks (in later years, flowing from a balding head), booming voice, courtly demeanor and what former Chief Justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court Bruce Littlejohn called his “courtroom theatrics”—he recalled an earlier time and manner. But he had future vision. Committed to fairness and equity, he was the first politician in South Carolina to speak out for the enfranchisement of black people. As the first white member of the state NAACP, he advised the organization on legal strategies.

Greenville, like all of the South, was, of course, rigidly segregated. A local chapter of the NAACP, however, had started in the early 1930s, and by the time Culbertson set up his office downtown, young black men and women were talking of registering to vote and of not running when the Ku Klux Klan appeared, as it did with some regularity, especially after a few brave black men and women dared to register. By that time, the Great Depression was slowly giving way, in part because of the injection of funding from the “alphabet agencies” set up by President Roosevelt’s New Deal but primarily from the military orders triggered by the threats of European war that were beginning to flow into Greenville mills.

In 1937, when the new Federal Building and post office on East Washington Street was completed with Works Progress Assocation (WPA) funding, federal, judicial and legal offices moved there from the old red brick Federal Building on Main Street. When the new structure was dedicated, Postmaster General James Farley mentioned with gratitude the work of Congressman John J. McSwain, who had just died, in shepherding the project through the funding process. The new building included a third-floor district courtroom considered one of the most handsome in the state. The 1892 Romanesque federal building was “traded” to Greenville to become city hall in exchange for the land on which the new structure was erected.

By 1940, men new to the Greenville bar were practicing there. They included not only those who were slightly older, like Culbertson, who was thirty when he set up his Greenville office, but also the next generation of attorneys. They were men like Patrick Bradley Morrah (1915–1992) and Richard Foster (1915–1998). Morrah received his undergraduate degree from the Citadel in 1936. After law school at Duke University, he returned to Greenville in 1939 and the next year was elected to the South Carolina House. He started young, but Foster edged him out. He was elected to the legislature in 1937 while he was still a student at the University of South Carolina Law School. He was underage when he took his seat and the youngest state representative in the nation. Foster was named a Juvenile Court judge in 1940. As a representative, he helped develop the state’s workers’ compensation laws. Those laws (only South Carolina



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.