The Black Pioneers of Los Angeles County: R.C.O. Benjamin, California’s First African-American Practicing Attorney, Part Five

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

R.C.O. Benjamin (1855-1900) wandered through a great deal of North American during the 1880s, living in several of the United States and, briefly, in Ontario, Canada, was the first African-American attorney to practice in several cities, ran and contributed material for newspapers and was a political activist.

He also, however, was involved in some legal issues, including a fraud conviction in Virginia, an apparent false accusation against two Canadians for the theft of watch and what seems like a breach of promise of marriage in Alabama—after all of which, he swiftly vanished from these areas and headed to new territory.

After that latter, he traveled west and got into further controversy in Houston, where his comments about a Black Baptist church and its services led to an arrest and a hearing, though the case was then dismissed. After a quick trip across the border from El Paso to Ciudad Juárez, Benjamin kept moving and entered Los Angeles by November 1887. The city’s Tribune of 2 November informed its readers,

R.C.O. Benjamin, Esq., late editor of the Negro American, Birmingham, Ala., is in this city with a view to permanent residence here. He is the man who attempted to see Senator [John] Sherman at his hotel, and was ejected from the house by the brutal landlord because of his color. He reports that about 1200 of his race in Alabama are preparing to leave that country for Southern California.

Five days later, the Sacramento Union reported that Benjamin, said to be “a graduate of Oxford,” note that other media accounts cited degrees from Lincoln and Howard universities, both Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and the University of Michigan, “and an orator of considerable experience, has been admitted to practice before the Los Angeles Courts.”

The 8 November edition of the Tulare Advance-Register added that Benjamin was admitted to the bar and then remarked “he is said to be the first negro to attain that dignity in California,” though he was not admitted to the bar, but to practice, a key distinction. The paper decided to conclude that,

There is certainly nothing to prevent a negro making a lawyer of himself, and a good one, if he happens to be built that way. There are brains concealed under a woolly skull oftentimes.

The Santa Barbara Press of the 9th also observed that Benjamin was “the first negro ever permitted to practice law in the State of California,” much less in Los Angeles. It added that he “is an author, a poet and one of the finest colored orators in the United States” and practiced before courts in Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky and Virginia “and has always been successful.”

This latter remark is an interesting one, because references in the press tended to be far more about his political activism than his courtroom work and that conviction in Virginia was because of misrepresentation of a Black client. Early in 1888, the news of his being admitted to practice in Los Angeles appeared in newspapers throughout the nation.

The Los Angeles Times of the 8th noted that a minister and “C.O. Benjamin made a few remarks in regard to the political attitude of [a] committee” that meant to push for temperance, that is, anti-alcohol, reform in the Angel City. This specifically referred to the “local option” concept, with the state constitution allowing cities and towns to prohibit saloons in their jurisdictions, and those in attendance seeking this move—something that would be pursued for three more decades as previous posts here have noted.

Five days later, the paper ran a notice from the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, which was distinct from the African Methodist Episcopal Church that was founded much earlier and which met in the Grand Opera House. It was mentioned that Benjamin was to give an address to the congregation on temperance.

The 9 December issue of the Los Angeles Sun ran an advertisement for a concert at the Congregational Church, situated at Hill and 3rd streets, by the Southern Jubilee Singers in a benefit for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union to build a headquarters at the corner of Fort [Broadway] and Temple streets. Benjamin was on the bill for a talk titled “Southern Life Among His People” and he was referred to as “the eminent colored lawyer, author and lecturer, who accompanies these celebrated singers on their tour through California” who “will, in his humorous and eloquent way decant” on his subject.

When the Times of the 15th covered the event, it commented that “the entertainment was opened by Prof. R.C.O. Benjamin,” that title being a new one, evidently, “a colored lawyer and the manager of the company.” The paper reported further that:

He said there was an idea current that the negroes were first landed in Jamestown in 1620 as slaves, but this was not so. They were first brought to America as a curiosity, and they remained a curiosity ever since. He continued by saying they were glad they were in California, the finest state in the Union, which exhibited more wealth; more intelligence and more pretty women than any other state in the United States, but they were especially pleased to be in Los Angeles, and working under the auspices of the grandest society established in this or any other era—the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

The following day, however, the Gazette of Huntsville, Alabama, where Benjamin lived and worked earlier in the decade, learned of its former resident’s westward wanderings and told its readers that “the erratic R.C.O. Benjamin has drifted to Los Angelos, Col. [sic] to beguile the natives with his silver tongue.”

As for the attorney’s first cases in the Angel City, the Sun of the 9th reported that George W. Baker and Charles Williams, both African-American, were playing cards in a gambling house on New High Street near the Plaza when a disagreement erupted and Baker shot Williams through the arm. The two were arrested and Baker was then arraigned on a charge with assault with a deadly weapon, with Benjamin and a white attorney named Mason representing him. When the case was called up, Williams, facing a separate petty larceny charge, was found to have left town, so Baker was freed.

With the arrival of 1888, it did not take long for Benjamin to make his mark in the Angel City’s political realm. The Times of the 19th reported that a meeting of Black male voters was held in the city court to determine how to approach representing their community’s interests in the next election. It was added that “the colored vote for the county amounts to some 700, with about 300 additional who will have qualified by residence in the state before the next Presidential election.”

As Los Angeles, whose mayor was William H. Workman, nephew of Homestead founders William Workman and Nicolasa Urioste, was in the midst of its great Boom of the 1880s, the significant growth in the Black population of town is represented in this statement. Only 14 persons appeared, however, and “after a cross-fire of interrogatory remarks,” Benjamin “took possession of the chair, considering, probably, such a matter as voting any one to the chair a superfluous ceremony.”

Still, he began remarks by introducing his long-held perspective that,

in the hands of the colored population lay the balance of power between the two parties , and that it was desirable that they should band themselves together for the common good, and, dropping party, be strictly independent of both Republicans and Democrats. They would in such manner be able to support any measure by which they would be gainers, whether fathered by the Republican or Democratic party.

The paper continued that these remarks “[s]eemed to give satisfaction to the very limited audience,” but a motion was approved to adjourn and schedule a second confab “and thus secure a large and representative gathering of the colored population.” There were at least a couple of addresses given by Benjamin to white audiences during the year, including a “comic speech” to the Illinoisians in town, known as the “Social Suckers,” on school systems in the Land of Lincoln and another, closer to the election, to the Irish-American Republicans.

With respect to his authorial side, Benjamin, in another first for a Black person in Los Angeles, published a book in April, an early example of one printed (by the Express newspaper’s house) in Los Angeles, with the Tribune of the 29th telling its readers that his work on the Haitian general and revolutionary Toussaint Louverture was such that, “it should be conceded without saying more that Mr. Benjamin is a man of more than ordinary ability.” After describing the organization and contents of the book is capsule form, the paper, which devoted more attention in a fairer way to Black Angelenos than its contemporaries, remarked,

It is proper to remark that Mr. Benjamin has committed an error, very pardonable to young authors, that of overrating his hero by crediting him with too much virtue. Altogether, the book is readable, and is truly a most noteworthy contribution to literature from the pen of a colored man.

It has been noted here that Benjamin was also a poet and an early published work of his, while living in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1883 was Poetic Gems. At least one poem appeared in print while he was in Los Angeles, this being published in the Tribune of 1 April and dated the day prior.

The work commemorated the death of United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Morrison Waite, who died on 23 March after fourteen years in that role, and Benjamin’s three-verse poem is worth seeing in its entirety, especially as it is very likely this is the first example of an African-American poet published in the Angel City:

Into the great unknown

Bravely he departed,

Loved ones left behind,

Dropping, broken-hearted,

But though he has passed away;

Turned again to nature’s clay,

His bright deeds and noble worth

Are not blotted from the earth.

Into the darkness drear,

Unfalteringly he advances;

Bitter tears, breaking hearts,

Cannot stay death’s lances,

But the record he has made,

Is not touched by death’s sharp blade;

His example yet will live—

To fainting hearts true courage give.

In death’s unending sleep,

Calmly he reposes;

Loving hands gently strew

Sweetest flowers and roses,

But no flower upon his breast

Purer is, or more at rest;

They will wither, die or fade,

Whilst he endless fame has made.

On 16 April, Benjamin registered to vote with Los Angeles County officials and his listing stated that has 34 years old, which would have meant a birth year of 1854, assuming his birthdate of 31 March; was a native of the West Indies; was an attoney; resided in the city’s Second Ward (there were five in town and the Second seems to have stretched from Macy Street (today’s César E. Chávez Avenue in Boyle Heights as far west as Temple Street and Beaudry Avenue and from Temple Street on the north to perhaps 3rd Street on the south); and was “Born of American parents,” a fact not mentioned elsewhere about his origins.

A week prior, another political meeting of African-Americans was convened “at the Rev. Jordan Allen’s church,” meaning the African Methodist Episcopal Church, then located the San Pedro Street residence in what is now Little Tokyo of Granville and Ellen Mason Owens Huddleston. As our post on Allen noted, it was soon after this that property was acquired in the pastor’s name and the first purpose-built First A.M.E. Church constructed at the northeast corner of San Pedro and Old Second Street, this latter soon renamed Azusa Street.

Benjamin called the meeting to order and stated that its purpose was to send delegates to the Republican National Convention, held in Chicago from 19-25 June, while also requesting that the meeting be kept secret. When, however, the floor was opened for discussion, the Herald of the 10th, reported that “some of these [comments] were of such an objectionable nature that two-thirds of those present left before the meeting was over” and Benjamin adjourned the much-depleted gathering.

Concerning his law practice, it looks as if Benjamin had a fairly steady roster of clients during the first months of 1888 including some in collaboration with Orange E. Mason, a white attorney who hailed from Massachusetts. These included criminal and civil matters, though there were some problems that arose. For example, in February, he filed suit against a pair of saloon owners he represented when their first effort to secure a license was rejected, but, after his arguments were successful and the license given, they refused to pay him—he did win a judgment, though whether he collected was another matter.

In another February incident, Benjamin purportedly told a Tribune reporter that he filed a court complaint against Richard Garvey, a prominent figure who was once an agent of Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin for his vast San Gabriel Valley properties (much obtained by foreclosure on a loan to the Temple and Workman bank), for breach of contract. Though it was represented that the lawyer was certain that the complaint was filed, an attempt by the paper to verify it could not be obtained because Benjamin could not be found—so the Tribune published something of a mea culpa.

A mid-March incident involved the arrest of a Black man named Twine who brought a married woman and her child back with him to Los Angeles after a visit to Texas. When a telegram informed local authorities of what happened, Twine and the woman, Katie Williams, were arrested, but Benjamin was hired to represent him and filed a writ of habeus corpus, which charged unlawful detainer, and quickly secured the release of the prisoner. Though Twine and Benjamin discussed working to release Williams on a similar writ, Twine vanished, leaving Williams on her own.

In early April, the attorney was at a Police Commission meeting, of which Mayor Workman was a member, and tried, during an undescribed portion of the gathering, to walk past the railing toward the commission members and was ejected from the room by a police officer. Benjamin filed a complaint against the officer, but the commission was told by him that he was “satisfied with the explanation given by the officer” and withdrew his charge.

The Times of 16 April recounted how Benjamin represented a Black waiter, known only as Williams, at the well-known Hotel Arcadia on the coast at Santa Monica. The paper observed that all of the wait staff at the resort hostelry were African-American men, but that “the proprietor thought wise to replace the colored waiters with men of a less lugubrious [dark?] hue.” A dispute arose between Williams, the head waiter, and a white steward purportedly behind the change in staffing, and the latter beat the former with the butt of a pistol

When a complaint was filed with the justice of the peace in the seaside town, Benjamin represented Williams at the preliminary and the paper recorded,

After considerable investigation the sons of Ham [the African-American waiters] scored a triumph over their opponents, for [W.] Clark was held to answer the charge of assault in the Superior Court for $500 bonds [bail]. Bail being forthcoming, he was released from custody.

It is not known, however, what the result of the trial brought for Clark. Another notable issue arose when the Los Angeles Herald of 2 April published, under the heading of “The Same Old Lies,” a lengthy diatribe against Benjamin by the Memphis Avalanche, a white-owned paper in the city where the lawyer first was granted a license to practice.

The Tennessee sheet referred to a response Benjamin gave to a letter to the Tribune by the Rev. Allen and published on 26 February concerning Black emigration to California, as the pastor was very much against it, as was pointed out in our post about Allen. The Avalanche informed its readers that “if our memory serves, this Benjamin is an adventurer who acquired a goodly share of the disrepute attaching to the reconstruction period in a neighboring state,” though which state was not stated and Benjamin was not in the South during Reconstruction, being in New York during that period.

The Memphis sheet, however, seethed that “like most of his class, he hates the people he robbed, and in the article in the Tribune spits at them the venom accumulated in his system since the time when the carpet-bag crew [Reconstruction figures] were driven from power by the exasperated [white] taxpayers of the South.” It attacked several points made by Benjamin in his rejoinder to Allen–we’ll begin the next part of the post with that response—but the conclusion of the Avalanche is telling:

If the Californians want negro immigration let them have it, by all means. Nobody in this part of the South will bar the exit of the colored brother with a shotgun.

Benjamin would, after his years in Los Angeles and while living in San Francisco, promote a scheme to encourage the mass migration of African-Americans to the Golden State. Meanwhile, we’ll return part six and carry on the story of Benjamin’s two-year sojourn in the Angel City.