Samuel R. Lowery

Samuel Robert Lowery was born on the ninth of December 1832 in Davidson County, Tennessee, near Nashville. His father, Peter Lowery, was born enslaved and later gained his freedom — freed by Ruth Mitchell, a woman of Cherokee heritage who became Samuel's mother — and rose to serve as a preacher in the Church of the Disciples. Ruth died in 1840, when Samuel was a boy of eight, and he was reared amid the discipline of faith and study.

Educated under the preacher Tolbert Fanning near Franklin College, Lowery began teaching school at sixteen and preaching in his youth. After the Civil War he read law and was admitted to the bar in Nashville, entering a profession that few men of his standing were then permitted to touch. In 1867, he and his father founded the Tennessee Manual Labor University at Smyrna, an institution devoted to agricultural and mechanical training for freedpeople.

On the second of February 1880, Lowery was admitted to the bar of the United States Supreme Court — nominated by the pioneering attorney Belva Ann Lockwood — becoming the first African American so admitted from a former slave state. It was a distinction won against the full weight of a hostile age, and it opened the highest court in the land to men who had lately been counted as property.

In his later years Lowery turned to enterprise and community, championing silk culture and founding the cooperative settlement of Loweryvale in Jefferson County, Alabama, where he died around 1900. He built where others only endured, and taught where the world would have kept him silent. May his labor and his courage be honored among the ancestors.