The year 1897 included several milestones in American history.
It was the year that President Grover Cleveland vetoed legislation that would have required immigrants to pass a literacy test.
It was the year Congress annexed Hawaii, even though 22,000 native Hawaiians signed a petition opposing the annexation.
Henry Dow, a journalist who was later founder of The Wall Street Journal, began charting trends of stocks and bonds that year; the Boston Marathon was run for the first time; and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point adopted the slogan, “Duty, Honor, Country.”
It was also the year The Jacksonville Bar Association was founded and the association and its members have since been an integral part of the city’s and the nation’s history.
Nine attorneys on Feb. 4 established the organization which quickly grew to 38 charter members. They were dedicated to regulating the practice and promoting improvements in the law and methods of administration; maintaining the honor and dignity of the profession; and cultivating professional ethics and social ties among its members.
The group celebrated its birth with a banquet on Feb. 26 at the Windsor Hotel, the start of a tradition that continues today as members gather each month for collegiality and occasionally, to conduct the association’s business.
The inaugural meeting was described in The Florida Times-Union as “one of the most brilliant events of the season.”
The group elected as its first president Duncan U. Fletcher, who served twice as Jacksonville’s mayor — 1893-95 and 1901-03. He also served in the U.S. Senate from 1909-36, where he was instrumental in reforming the American financial system through passage of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934.
The JBA has its place in the Civil Rights movement as well. Its first African-American member, Earl M. Johnson, was inducted in 1966.
He filed most of the federal school desegregation cases in Florida and represented Martin Luther King Jr. after the civil rights leader was arrested in 1964 after a protest march in St. Augustine.
Johnson also served as secretary of the Local Government Study Commission that drafted the plan that consolidated Jacksonville and Duval County’s governments in 1968. He was the first African-American elected to countywide office in 1967 and later served as City Council president.
Actually, consolidation of local government was brought up three decades earlier by members of The JBA.
When Jacksonville’s economy crashed in the 1930s, a committee, led by C. Daughtry Towers, reported that government expenses could be reduced by combining the two systems. He remained a crusader for consolidation until it was approved by voters 30 years later.
The association’s female lawyers have their place in history as well, both in the courtroom and on the bench.
Prominent names include former Circuit Judges Virginia Beverly and Dorothy Pate and U.S. Court of Appeals Senior Judge Susan Black, who will be the keynote speaker at the JBA’s annual Law Day luncheon on Tuesday.
There have been five women elected president of the association, beginning with Mary K. Phillips in 1986. She was followed by Karen Cole in 1992, Caroline Emery in 2007, Courtney Grimm in 2010 and Giselle Carson in 2015.
The local Bar’s place in history yet to be written cannot be known, but the JBA addressed that subject more than 50 years ago with a few sentences in its 1965 handbook.
Every day is history, it said. “The events, the moods, times and places and upper-most, the people, without which there would be no law or history, and the members of the Bar are a part.”
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