Robert Morris (June 8, 1823 – December 12, 1882) was an African-American attorney. He was one of the first black lawyers in the United States.[1] He has been called "the first really successful colored lawyer in America."[2]
Admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1847, Morris may have been the first black man to file a lawsuit in the U.S. (He prevailed.) He opened the first black law office in the United States with partner Macon Bolling Allen (incidentally, the first black American lawyer).
He was active in black and abolitionist causes, notably filing and trying the first U.S. civil rights challenge to segregated public schools in the 1848 case of Roberts v. Boston. The case, pressed by Morris and Charles Sumner, is believed to be the first legal challenge of the "separate but equal" practice in America. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled against Morris in 1850, a decision cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in support of its Plessy v. Ferguson ruling in 1896, which codified the "separate but equal" standard. "Separate but equal" was ultimately overturned by the high court in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Morris was commissioned as a magistrate of Essex County, Massachusetts by the governor, making him the second black lawyer to hold a judicial post. He ran for mayor of Chelsea, Massachusetts in 1866.