John Hugh Carmichael (1868–1950)

John Hugh Carmichael was a prominent Little Rock (Pulaski County) attorney, politician, and judge. He was the dean of the Arkansas Law School (the predecessor to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law) in Little Rock from 1898 to 1950. While serving as dean, Carmichael acted as co-counsel in numerous cases with renowned Black attorney Scipio Africanus Jones. They worked together on a wide range of issues, including challenging the practice of excluding African American citizens from juries, defending the Black men convicted of murder after the Elaine Massacre, and representing prominent Black fraternal organizations.

John Hugh Carmichael was born on February 2, 1868, in Cairo, Illinois, to Isaac Carmichael, who was a former Union army sergeant from Illinois, and Minerva Beck Carmichael, who was from Georgia. In 1883, the family settled in Booneville (Logan County), where Carmichael attended Fort Smith District High School in Fort Smith (Sebastian County).

After further studies at Paris Academy in Paris (Logan County), Carmichael moved to Little Rock in 1891 and began studying law. When the Arkansas Industrial University (later the University of Arkansas) in Fayetteville (Washington County) established the Law Department in Little Rock under Dean Frank M. Goar in 1892, Carmichael became a member of its first class. He was admitted to the bar of Arkansas in 1893 while still a law student, and he graduated first in his class in 1894. After graduating, Carmichael started his law practice in Little Rock, and, only three years later, began teaching classes at his alma mater.

In 1898, Goar decided to run for attorney general, but he died while on the campaign trail. Carmichael, whom Goar had appointed to run the law school in his absence, became interim dean, setting off a years-long struggle with the university over control of the law school in Little Rock. The board of trustees wished to follow modern national trends in legal education, including standardizing requirements for graduation and attorney licensing and offering a more  academic-based approach to learning. This was in direct conflict with the vision of the law school in Little Rock, which operated as a night school and proudly used “practical, common-sense methods” to educate a wide range of students, including aspiring lawyers, business professionals who wanted to know more about the law, and lawyers wishing to brush up on their skills.

After Goar’s death, the board appointed Mark Valentine—a former Louisiana plantation slave owner and Confederate army lieutenant—as dean. Although Valentine was a prominent lawyer and judge in Little Rock, he had no prior connection to the law school. He was not an alumnus, and he had lived in Little Rock for only eight years. Thus, he would not have been a part of the tightknit community of Little Rock lawyers connected to the law school, and it is likely that the reform-minded board saw him as someone who would be amenable to change.

Numerous newspaper accounts of the time reported that the board’s decision to appoint Valentine angered the law school faculty, students, and alumni. They “threatened to secede” from the university unless the board chose one of their preferred dean candidates. The majority of the Law Department wanted either Carmichael or another faculty member, John Fletcher. Eventually, the board relented and appointed Fletcher, who resigned less than a year later, and the board reluctantly gave the post to Carmichael.

From 1892 to 1915, the law school at Little Rock officially operated as the Law Department of Arkansas Industrial University. However, the law school was essentially independent, receiving no funds or financial aid from the state. Carmichael reportedly ran the school with such a firm hand that it was often called “Carmichael’s Law School.” The board attempted twice to bring the law school under the control of the Arkansas Industrial University Board of Trustees, but, ultimately, the board and Carmichael could never agree on terms. As a result, Carmichael—with the support of the school’s faculty, students, and alumni—wrote to the board in 1915 officially severing ties. After that, the school operated as a private, non-accredited night school named the Arkansas Law School. Carmichael served as its dean until his death in 1950.

Carmichael also engaged in criminal and civil law practice. He was well known in the community for his representation of the financial institutions of Little Rock. He served in many professional posts, including as a judge on the chancery, circuit, and supreme courts. Additionally, he served on the first Board of Law Examiners in Arkansas. He was a prominent and fervent Democrat, and active in many political endeavors. These endeavors included serving in the Young Men’s Democratic Club, as delegate to the state Democratic Convention, and as legal advisor to Democratic candidates and committees.

At a time when many Democrats in Arkansas supported efforts to segregate Blacks and whites, Carmichael is perhaps most notable today for his long professional relationship with Scipio Jones, a Black Little Rock lawyer (and prominent Black and Tan Republican) who would eventually become nationally recognized for his representation of the defendants in the Elaine Massacre cases.

Carmichael and Jones’s partnership started in 1901, when Carmichael assisted Jones in representing two Black defendants’ appeal of their convictions in Castleberry v. State and Eastling v. State. In these two cases, Jones and Carmichael argued that the defendants’ convictions should be overturned because Black citizens had been unconstitutionally excluded from the juries. The evidence suggests, however, that Carmichael’s involvement in the appeals of these two cases was limited. (Black attorneys at the time were often expected to co-counsel with white attorneys in the segregated court order, and not to handle cases by themselves.) But it is notable that Carmichael signed his name to Jones’s appellate briefs, which directly challenged the racial status quo of the Arkansas criminal justice system.

After these two cases, Carmichael took on more active roles in several of Jones’s civil rights cases. For example, in 1921, Carmichael appears as an attorney of record alongside Jones and Edgar L. McHaney in one of the Elaine Massacre cases, State v. Martineau (eventually, Moore v. Dempsey). Newspaper accounts of the time show that Carmichael joined Jones and McHaney in oral argument before the Arkansas Supreme Court, arguing vigorously in support of a complicated jurisdictional maneuver that, while ultimately unsuccessful, delayed the execution of the Moore defendants long enough to allow Jones, George Murphy, Moorfield Storey, and Ulysses Bratton to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. As a result, they were able to obtain the defendants’ release from prison.

Carmichael also partnered with Jones in litigation supporting prominent Black businessmen, businesses, and fraternal organizations. He is listed as co-counsel in several cases involving the dissolution and claims of creditors of Mifflin Wistar Gibbs’s Capitol City Savings Bank, Arkansas’s second Black-owned bank. Furthermore, Carmichael is listed as the attorney of record with Jones in several cases defending Black fraternal organizations, such as the Ancient Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine and the Knights and Daughters of Tabor. In 1922, Carmichael and Jones defended two Black Shriners organizations—the Mystic Shrines in both Little Rock and Houston, Texas—after white Shriners organizations sued to prevent them from using the Shriners name. Carmichael and Jones worked closely together on these cases, including filing briefs, making arguments in court, and traveling to Texas. One of the cases, Ancient Egyptian Arabic Ord. of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine v. Michaux, eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Prominent civil rights lawyers, including Moorfield Storey, argued on behalf of Jones and Carmichael’s clients. This case has been credited by some scholars as teaching pre-NAACP lawyers the value of bringing test cases in “federal courts to seek redress for rights denied at the state or local level.”

Carmichael also engaged in his own civil rights litigation and advocacy. In 1910, he obtained the reversal of a conviction for Will Garner, a thirteen-year-old Black child accused of murder. He argued successfully that the child received ineffective assistance of counsel because the child’s white lawyer told him in front of the jury at the end of the case that “he never wanted to speak to defendant, or defendant to come to his presence…and bade the defendant…a tragic goodbye.” In 1911, Carmichael was the sole counsel to argue the appeal of John Henry Warren, a Black man sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison for allegedly assaulting a white woman in her home. At his trial, the prosecutor urged the jury to ignore Warren’s alibi evidence, telling them, “A verdict of acquittal is equivalent to telling your wives and daughters that there is little protection for them.” On appeal, Carmichael “earnestly argued” that the prosecutor’s statements were “an appeal to race prejudice and…calculated to arouse the passion and prejudice of the jury on account of the defendant being a negro.” Carmichael’s arguments failed to persuade the Court, however, and Warren stayed in prison until 1921.

Collectively, the evidence suggests that Carmichael possessed a complex web of values. On the one hand, he had a strong sense of equity and justice, which is reflected in his litigation with Jones. He was not afraid to take on high-profile cases defending Black men—even when the white community’s passions were inflamed (as in the Elaine Massacre case), and when his legal work could hurt him and the law school he led. He also wasn’t afraid to take on—and explicitly call out—what he saw as injustice, race bias, and prejudice in the legal system. For a white, leading Southern Democrat and law school dean of this time, such actions were uncommon and remarkable. On the other hand, Carmichael held paternalistic and patronizing views toward Arkansas’s Black citizenry. Although he admired Jones enough to write an enthusiastic biography about him in 1939, that same biography was titled, “The Story of the Little Negro Boy.” Further, there is no evidence that Carmichael admitted Black students to the Arkansas Law School during his time as dean, and, although he was active in Democratic politics of the time, there is no record of him attempting to move the party toward racial justice or racial equality.

Carmichael married Amelia Parker from Mississippi in 1893, and they had four children: Lentes, Camile, Celestes, and John Hugh Jr. After his wife died, he married Lily Mae Bryan Beauchamp, one of his former students; she then became a registrar, executive secretary, director, and trustee of the Arkansas Law School.

Carmichael died on March 6, 1950, and is buried in Roselawn Memorial Park in Little Rock.

For additional information:
Ancient Egyptian Arabic Ord. of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine v. Michaux, 279 U.S. 737 (1929).

Carmichael, John H. “The Story of a Little Negro Boy.” In The Scrapbook of Arkansas Literature: An Anthology for the General Reader. Edited by Octavius Coke. Little Rock: American Caxton Society Press, 1939.

Garner v. State, 97 Ark. 63 (1910).

Gitelman, Mort. “One Hundred Years of Legal Education in Arkansas.” Arkansas Lawyer 33 (Winter 1998): 12–15.

Hempstead, Fay. Historical Review of Arkansas: Its Commerce, Industry and Modern Affairs. Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1911.

Leflar, Robert. “Legal Education in Arkansas: A Brief History of the Law School.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 21 (Summer 1962): 99–131.

Nichols, Guerdon D. “Breaking the Color Barrier at the University of Arkansas.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 27 (Spring 1968): 3–21.

“Texas Shriners Lose Case to Whites.” Colorado Statesman, March 15, 1924, p. 1.

Wright, Robert R., III. “A Brief History of Legal Education in Arkansas.” University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review 20 (1998): 835–837.

Briana Lynn Rosenbaum
University of Tennessee College of Law