NORTH CAROLINA LAW REVIEW Volume 92 Article 5 Number 6 North Carolina Issue 9-1-2014 The Old lB ack Corporate Bar: Durham's Wall Street, 1898-1971 Amos N. Jones Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/nclr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Amos N. Jones, The Old Black Corporate Bar: Durham's Wall Street, 1898-1971, 92 N.C. L. Rev. 1831 (2014). Available at: http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/nclr/vol92/iss6/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Carolina Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in North Carolina Law Review by an authorized administrator of Carolina Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. THE "OLD" BLACK CORPORATE BAR: DURHAM'S WALL STREET, 1898-1971* AMOS N. JONES" Over the last twenty years, eminent scholars such as David Wilkins have paid considerable attention to the "new black corporate bar" as a phenomenon worthy of treatment. This Article builds on that work by introducing a fascinating law- practice reality that developed in a unique setting in the early 1900s American South. What if Wall Street had been black? What if its elite feeder institutions had been black? What if the black bar were, in a corporate economy of scale, relatively sizable? These questions might make for fascinating counterfactuals, if not for the concrete reality that such a community-albeit small-actually existed, expanded, and prospered in midcentury Durham, North Carolina. Coining the term "old black corporatebar" to stand in distinction to the "new black corporate bar," the Article analyzes the world in which that exceptional and heretofore unexamined black bar germinated and influenced a relatively sophisticated legal landscape in a moderate, midsized southern city backdropped by a laissez-faire white leadership class that proved progressive for racialrelations.