Lutie Lytle

Lutie A. Lytle was born on the nineteenth of November 1875 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, a daughter of John R. and Mary Ann "Mollie" Lytle, both formerly enslaved. Her father earned his living chiefly as a barber — and for a time as a policeman in Topeka — and stood among the ardent Black Republican workers of the post-Reconstruction South. About 1882 the family joined the great Exoduster migration westward, settling in Topeka, Kansas, where Lutie came of age.

Returning south, she taught school in Chattanooga before enrolling in the law course of Central Tennessee College in Nashville. In 1897 she graduated as valedictorian and, that September, was admitted to the bar — one of the first African American women in the nation permitted to practice law, and by the accounts of her day the first in any Southern state's courts. Later the same month she was admitted to the bar of Kansas as well, the first African American woman to be so received there.

In 1898 Lytle returned to her alma mater as a member of its law faculty and its librarian, remaining through the spring of 1899. In that chair she is remembered as the first woman to teach law in a chartered American law school — a distinction the press of the era proclaimed across the country. She afterward practiced in Topeka and later in Brooklyn, New York, and remained active in the clubwomen's movement of her time.

She died on the twelfth of November 1955. May the name of Lutie Lytle be spoken with honor, a woman who opened a door in the law that had been shut, and held it open for all who followed.