In 1903, McCants Stewart became the first African-American lawyer in Multnomah County and all of Oregon. Stewart was a sole practitioner in Portland. He worked to better the civil rights of African-Americans and co-founded The Advocate, a newspaper for the black community. Unable to make a living in Portland, he left the state.
Fast forward to 1939, when Minoru Yasui graduated with honors from the U of O Law School and became the only Japanese American attorney in Oregon. He was unable to find employment in Oregon, so he worked for the Japanese consulate in Chicago. After Pearl Harbor, he returned to Portland and opened a law practice to help the Japanese community. However, he was arrested by the Portland police when he challenged the curfew law applied to Japanese Americans. The US District Court for the District of Oregon amazingly found that he had renounced his citizenship by working for the Japanese consulate. He was incarcerated in solitary confinement. Ultimately, the US Supreme Court reviewed his case. Not surprisingly, Yasui did not return to practice in Oregon, choosing instead to continue his career in Colorado.
By 1975, the short-lived Oregon careers of Stewart and Yasui were history, but the isolation that they experienced was not. At that time, the OSB focused attention on the dismally low numbers of attorneys of color in the bar. The 27 attorneys of color in Oregon comprised one-half of 1% of active bar membership. That percentage was vastly disproportionate to that of racial minorities living in Oregon at the time.
In 1975, at the recommendation of the Civil Rights Committee, the OSB established the Affirmative Action Program (AAP), with the goal of achieving “representation of minority persons in the Bar in the same proportion as they are represented in the population of Oregon, while at the same time not lowering the standards for admittance.” Since then, the AAP has contributed to a gradual increase in the number of lawyers of color in the bar.
I moved to Oregon in 1987 from New York City. I was shocked to experience the overwhelming paucity of people of color in the general population and more so in the bar relative to New York. I have still not forgotten instances of lawyers assuming that as an Asian woman, I probably was a recent immigrant and they had to speak very slowly and clearly for me. I have clear memories of white attorneys insinuating at depositions that I had trouble reading English. I certainly questioned whether Oregon was a place to stay.
In the 1980s, the Association of Oregon Black Lawyers (AOBL) was the sole organization for lawyers of color in Oregon. Then, over 15 years ago, a number of attorneys started meeting regularly in Portland – some AOBL members, Asian American attorneys and Hispanic attorneys – to talk about forming a larger organization and to develop a community of lawyers of color. Some of those lawyers had been practicing since the 1970s, and some were lawyers of more recent vintage. On June 13, 1991, Oregon Minority Lawyers Association (OMLA) was incorporated.
OMLA’s mission is to promote fair and just treatment of all people under law regardless of race or color; to further the professional development and advancement of lawyers and law students who are people of color; to offer social opportunities for lawyers, law graduates and law students who are people of color; and to educate members, the public, and the legal profession about legal issues affecting people of color. OMLA’s members knew from the beginning that a sense of community makes a real difference for lawyers and law students of color, and that a community of lawyers and law students of color would benefit the profession, clients and the public we serve.
Thankfully, progress has been made to diversify the bar. As of the end of last year, 701 lawyers, or 5.5% of OSB members, self-identified as ethnic minorities. But that number still falls short of proportional representation of Oregon’s racial minority population. According to the US Census Bureau’s estimates for 2005, racial minorities comprise 9.1% of the state’s population. The Multnomah County figure is even higher. The Census Bureau’s 2004 American Community Survey for the county states that an estimated 19.1% of household residents were racial minorities.
The renewal of the bar’s AAP is up for a vote before the House of Delegates on September 16. We need to continue the effort to diversify the bar so that it is representative of everyone in our state. AAP is a part of that effort, as are bar organizations like OMLA, the Oregon Chapter of the National Bar Association, and the local affiliate of the Hispanic National Bar Association. The MBA has also committed itself to promoting diversity in the practice of law and I encourage my fellow MBA members to actively support the AAP and bar associations like OMLA.
This article appeared in the July/August 2006 issue of Multnomah Lawyer, the monthly newsletter of the Multnomah Bar Association. View the article on the MBA's Web site at http://www.mbabar.org/docs/newsletters/ml_julaug2006.pdf.
