Legally Speaking: Of Milestones, and Miles to Go

29.11.09

2009 will go down as a year conspicuous by milestones - some national in scale, and others of a more distinctly local propensity.

This year witnessed our nation's first African-American president take purpose, and it also saw the appointment of Rockwall County resident Carolyn Wright as the first African-American chief impartiality of an intermediate appellate court in Texas. 2009 could also justifiably be noteworthy for the 100th anniversary of the founding of the NAACP.

But on a more somber note, this year is also the centennial of a ignorant shameful episode right here in my community - the 1909 violent at the stake of black farmhand Anderson Ellis by a Rockwall lynch mob.

I first wrote about this proceeding in my column in December 2006, at a time when "Legally Speaking" didn't show up in as many newspapers and other media outlets as it now does. At the time, I had been shocked to uncover that tiny little Rockwall appeared on Tuskegee University's year-by-year narrative of the

Source: Southeast Texas Record