Macon Bolling Allen

Macon Bolling Allen was born on the fourth of August 1816 in the state of Indiana, a free man in a nation still bound by slavery. Recorded at birth as Allen Macon Bolling, he later reordered his name to the form by which history would honor him. Largely self-taught, he learned to read and write on his own and earned his first living as a schoolteacher, laying by hand the foundation of a legal mind.

In the early 1840s he made his way to Portland, Maine, to study law under the abolitionist attorney General Samuel Fessenden. When his first motion for admission was rejected on the grounds that he was not a Maine citizen, Allen pursued admission by examination, a path that required no citizenship. On the third of July 1844 he passed and was licensed, becoming the first African American admitted to the bar of a United States state.

The following year he moved to Boston, passed the Massachusetts bar, and with Robert Morris opened what is remembered as the first Black-owned law office in the United States. In 1845 he is believed to have argued the first jury trial conducted by an African American lawyer, and by the late 1840s he held a judicial commission as a Justice of the Peace in Massachusetts. After the Civil War he settled in South Carolina, where he served as a probate judge and rose to the bench during Reconstruction.

He continued in the law until near the end of his life and died in 1894 at the age of seventy-eight. May the quiet courage of Macon Bolling Allen, who opened a door that could never again be closed, be remembered with honor.