Lutie Lytle

Lutie A. Lytle was born on the twenty-second of October 1875 at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the daughter of John R. Lytle — a Tennessee saddle-maker and one of the principal Black-Republican delegates of the post-Reconstruction Tennessee — and Mary Ann Smith Lytle. The family moved to Topeka, Kansas in 1882 in his trade and in the Black-Republican network of the Kansas Black-emigration Exoduster period of the late 1870s, and Lytle was raised in the Topeka Black middle-class community.

She was placed at six at the Topeka public schools and at the Topeka High School. She took the bachelor’s in 1894 from the Topeka Industrial and Educational Institute — the Black industrial-and-normal school of the Kansas Exoduster community — and worked from 1894 to 1896 as a printer at the Topeka Tribune and the Wichita-based Black weekly The Negro Outlook under the editor Charles G. Goodwin.

She was admitted in September 1896 at twenty-one — at her father’s correspondence — to the Central Tennessee College of Law at Nashville, Tennessee — the law department of the historically Black Central Tennessee College, which had been established by the Methodist Episcopal Church North in 1879. She completed the one-year law programme in the late summer of 1897 at twenty-one.

She was admitted to the Tennessee state bar by examination on the tenth of September 1897 — the first African American woman admitted to the bar of any southern state. She was the third Black woman in the United States to be admitted to any state bar — after Charlotte E. Ray (District of Columbia, 1872) and Mary Anne Shadd Cary (District of Columbia, 1881).

She was admitted in 1898 to the Kansas state bar on her return to Topeka — the first African American woman admitted to the Kansas state bar.

She was hired at the close of 1897 by the Central Tennessee College of Law at Nashville as instructor in domestic relations and criminal procedure — the first woman of any race to teach at a chartered law school in the United States. She held the Central Tennessee position for one academic year through May 1898.

She relocated to Topeka in 1898 and opened a private law practice at the corner of Sixth and Kansas Avenue at Topeka — among the first Black private legal practices owned by a woman in the Kansas of the post-Reconstruction period.

She married Alfred Cowan in 1899 and continued the legal practice across the closing years of the 1890s and the opening years of the 1900s. The Cowans relocated to Brooklyn, New York in 1904, where she resumed law practice from 1907 until her formal retirement in 1925.

She was a charter member of the National Association of Negro Lawyers — the first Black-women’s lawyers’ organisation in the United States, founded in 1925 at New York — and served as the Association’s recording secretary from 1925 to 1940.

She died at Brooklyn on the twenty-third of August 1955 of natural causes, at seventy-nine.

She is honored here as the first Black woman bar admission of the American South.