Featured Alumnus

Abraham Beverley Walker

The first person to enroll in what is now the University of New Brunswick Law was Abraham Walker, the first Canadian-born Black to become a student-at-law (1878) and lawyer (1881). Enjoy this profile of Walker, prepared by UNB Law Professor and legal historian David Bell.

When what is now UNB Law School opened its doors at Saint John, on Saturday evening, 8 October 1892, the first person to sign on as a student in this experiment in local legal education was Abraham Beverley Walker (1851-1909). Already the first Canadian-born Black to become a student-at-law (1878) and lawyer (1881), now A.B. Walker became first New Brunswicker to endorse the sort of systematic legal instruction that only formal study could provide. That Walker should have found time to follow the school's curriculum in both 1892-93 and 1893-94 reflects the dedication to learning and improvement that marks him out as the foremost black intellectual of his day in Canada.

Born on the Kingston peninsula, a descendant of free Blacks who arrived with the Loyalists, Walker both articled with a Saint John lawyer and (unusual for the time) took an LLB degree, in his case from the National University at Washington. In 1881 he was elected to the executive of Saint John’s Law Students’ Society. Later that year he was admitted as an attorney; he was called to the NB bar in 1882. Already Walker was a noted shorthand reporter and, although he was denied a position as official court stenographer, it may have been in this manner that he earned most of his living. Significantly, perhaps, his wife kept a shop. Although he claimed to have marshalled Saint John’s Negro population into a voting bloc, it earned him no commensurate political reward. Walker’s experience at the Saint John bar was sufficiently disappointing that he removed to Georgia for a time about 1889-90.

It may have been this sojourn in the US that turned the restless Walker's thinking in a creative way towards the place of Blacks in North American society. While in Atlanta he published a pamphlet analysing The Negro Problem; or, The Philosophy of Race Development (1890) from what he called a "Canadian standpoint". After his return Walker spent the remaining years of his short life articulating, in print and on the lecture platform, a vision of the "trials, hardships and destiny" of his race. Walker’s biographer labels him a "black supremacist" but adds that his intellectual stance was premised more on racial antiquity than supremacy. Founder of the "African Civilization Movement", he advocated creating in British Africa "an exemplary colony of intelligent and industrious blacks drawn from Canada and other English-speaking countries". He is said to have published a 700-page elaboration of the scheme in 1908 but no copy is located yet. Today his best-known literary production is Neith, an impressive Saint John magazine of which he produced five issues in 1903-04. While affirming that "Neith is not a Negro magazine, but a Canadian magazine", it is significant that Walker named it after an Egyptian goddess, for he held that ancient Egyptians were black.

In 1907, in the second of his unsuccessful applications for a KC, Walker styled himself the "senior Negro lawyer in the British Empire", but there is no evidence that his law practice was ever a success. Yet in the legal history of Canada, and in the story of UNB’s Law School, A.B. Walker holds an honoured place. He was more than the first student to enroll. For half a dozen years beginning in 1893 he was librarian of the Saint John Law Society; in that capacity he superintended the only collection of books to which law students had access. Several of the early published descriptions of the Law School enterprise are from his pen. All are markedly upbeat in tone, reflecting the enthusiastic temperament of a man who himself had overcome much. Walker died of tuberculosis in 1909, aged only 58. He was denied the satisfaction of seeing a second black student enroll at the Law School. So far as we know, that did not occur until 1961.

Sources

J.B. Cahill, "Abraham Beverley Walker", Dictionary of Canadian Biography, XIII (1994), 1066-68 (includes bibliography of Walker’s imprints)
J.B. Cahill, "First Things in Africadia: or, The Trauma of being a Black Lawyer in Late Victorian Saint John", (1998) 47 UNB Law Jl 367-77
D.G. Bell, Legal Education in New Brunswick: A History (1992), ch 3