What outspoken abolitionist and author of "An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World" was also the father of one of the first black men to pass the Massachusetts bar?
Edward G. Walker Edward Garrison Walker, also known as Edwin Garrison Walker (1830–1901), was an American artisan in Boston who became an attorney in 1861; he was one of the first black men to pass the Massachusetts bar. He later became a politician and in 1866, nine years after the state extended the franchise to African-American men, he and Charles Lewis Mitchell were the first two black men elected to the Massachusetts State Legislature. Walker was the son of Eliza and David Walker, an abolitionist who had written an appeal in 1829 calling for the end of slavery.
William H. Lewis William Henry Lewis (November 28, 1868 – January 1, 1949) was an African-American pioneer in athletics, law and politics. Born in Virginia as the son of freedmen, he went to college in Massachusetts, where he became one of the first African-American college football players, and the first in the sport to be selected as an All-American. In 1903 Lewis was the first African American to be appointed as an Assistant United States Attorney; in 1910 he was the first to be appointed as one of the five United States Assistant Attorneys General, despite opposition by the Southern Democratic block; and in 1911 he was the among the first African Americans to be admitted to the American Bar Association.