LOUISIANA.
Examination of the Law Department at Straight University.
It was my pleasure to fall in upon the Straight University at the time of the annual examination in its Law Department. The exercises came off at the office of the Dean of the Law Faculty, Judge Alfred Shaw. There were present, also, the three other Professors, J. C. Walker, Esq., and Honorables M. M. Cohen and R. T. Posey, and Dr. W. S. Alexander, President of the University. Eight young men were examined for graduation, one of whom, J. B. Gaudet, was colored. Pres. Alexander, leading off in general questions, each of the Professors followed in the line of his department. The young men had taken the two courses of lectures and had read law in private, or under preceptors. All were approved. By the laws of Louisiana, graduation from this Institution admits at the Bar for practice. The State University’s Law Department has the same prerogative. So fades out the color line. Our institutions are color-blind. Brains and culture stand on their own merit. The accomplished white law-lecturers and the bright white students receive the colored aspirant lawyers on the basis of citizenship and scholarship. Simon Cameron repeats at the North, after a tour of the South, “the picked-up notion of ‘over-education’ among the blacks, the same, of whom awhile ago it was said that they could not take on the higher education. But how would the Pennsylvania statesman have these sable attorneys prepared for their profession and for the competition of life and business? Does it not come with an ill grace that a man who has himself risen from humble position, should rule down these Africo-Americans to an education that would simply fit them for good servants?” Of the twenty-five graduates of this Law Department, seven are colored, and they are making their way successfully in the Courts. Of the nineteen students now in the course, five are colored. One is the pastor of the English Lutheran Church of the city, a former graduate of a Pennsylvania College, and of Princeton Seminary.