Samuel R. Lowery

Samuel Robert Lowery was born on the ninth of December 1832 at Davidson County, Tennessee, the son of Peter Lowery — a free Black blacksmith of the Nashville Stones River farm of his free-Black ancestral household — and Ruth Mitchell Lowery, a free Black woman of central Tennessee. He was raised in the relatively prosperous free-Black household of his father at the agricultural Stones River farm.

He was placed at six at his father’s informal household school — Tennessee state law of the period prohibited the public schooling of any Black child — and was further tutored at twelve at the Franklin College at Nashville under the white president of the College, the Reverend Dr. Daniel A. Holman, who admitted Lowery to the College’s preparatory programme on the recommendation of his father Peter Lowery.

He completed in 1849 at sixteen the bachelor’s programme at the New Albany Theological Seminary at New Albany, Indiana — among the principal abolitionist seminaries of the antebellum Ohio River valley.

He served as a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) preacher at the Nashville and Memphis Black congregations across the closing years of the 1850s and the Civil War period.

He was admitted in 1875 — at forty-three — by examination of the Tennessee state bar to the practice of law.

He relocated to Huntsville, Alabama in 1875 and founded at Huntsville the same year the Lowery Industrial Academy at Huntsville — a Black industrial-and-normal school modelled on the Tuskegee Institute curriculum. He served as the Academy’s principal until 1880, during which the Academy graduated the principal early Black silk-industry-and-textile workers of the post-Reconstruction American South.

He was admitted to the Alabama state bar in 1879 and was the principal litigation attorney of the Lowery silk-industry trial of the Alabama Hopkins-and-Lowery silk-cocoon-and-thread case of 1879. The Lowery silk-industry trial was a federal contract-enforcement case on a $4,000 silk-cocoon contract.

He was admitted to the bar of the United States Supreme Court on the second of February 1880 — the third African American admitted to the Supreme Court bar after John Sweat Rock (1865) and Thomas Smith Davis (1866). He argued before the Supreme Court the principal Lowery silk-cocoon case the same day — the case Hopkins v. Lowery (1880), heard at the bench of the United States Supreme Court at the Capitol Building under Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite. Lowery was the first African American attorney to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court.

He was named in 1881 the United States Postmaster of the Whitesburg, Alabama post office — among the early Black postmasters of the post-Reconstruction American South.

He founded in 1893 with his son Henry Lowery the Lowery Sericulture and Silk Manufacturing Company at Huntsville — the first Black-owned silk-cocoon-and-thread manufacturer of the United States. The firm operated for nine years through 1902.

He died at Huntsville, Alabama on the thirty-first of December 1900 of complications of pulmonary disease, at sixty-eight.

He is honored here as the first Black attorney before the Supreme Court.