Emanuel D. Molyneaux Hewlett

Hewlett was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 15, 1850, the son of Aaron Molyneaux Hewlett (c. 1821-December 6, 1871) and Virginia Josephine Molyneaux Hewlett (née Lewis, c. 1821–1882). He had two sisters, Virginia Lind and Aaronella, and two brothers, Aaron and Paul, a Shakespearean actor who performed under the name "Paul Molyneaux."[2][3]

Aaron Molyneaux Hewlett in 1859, posing with exercise equipment.

Aaron and Virginia Hewlett were part of the nineteenth-century physical culture movement. In 1854 Aaron Hewlett, who had previously worked as a barber and a porter, opened a sparring school called Molineaux House in Brooklyn. The following year the family moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, where he opened a popular gymnasium. This move led to his being hired in 1859 as the first director of Harvard College's new gymnasium, where he worked for fourteen years, serving as an instructor in gymnastics, baseball, rowing, and boxing, coaching sports teams, and managing the gym's equipment.[4][5][6] Virginia Hewlett was a gymnastics instructor who held courses for women.[7] They ran a gymnasium in Cambridge together in addition to Aaron's work at Harvard.[6]

Aaron Hewlett was active in the fight for civil rights for African Americans in Massachusetts, challenging illegal discrimination in public places and supporting alternatives to discriminatory institutions. In April 1866, after he and one of his daughters were forced by the staff of the Boston Theater to sit in the balcony even though they had purchased tickets for seats in the parquet, he petitioned for changes to Massachusetts' anti-discrimination law, on the grounds that the current law clearly wasn't working.[8] Two years later he was part of a group of twenty people who petitioned to have the license of a Cambridge skating rink revoked on grounds of unlawful discrimination. Also in 1868, he was part of a group that incorporated the Cambridge Land and Building Association, an organization formed to provide loans for African Americans who could not get service from white-run banks.[9]

Hewlett attended Cambridge public schools and graduated from Cambridge High School.[10] He then studied at Boston University School of Law, becoming its first black graduate in 1877.[11]

As a member of the Supreme Court bar, Hewlett was involved in ten cases as counsel or co-counsel, often joining appeals filed on behalf of black southern defendants.[16][17] He recommended at least two other African American attorneys for admission to the bar, Noah W. Parden of Tennessee in 1906 and Shelby J. Davidson of Kentucky in 1912.[18]

Many of the cases with which Hewlett was associated were attempts to win a broad interpretation of the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution by the Supreme Court by arguing that the civil rights of black defendants, especially the right to equal protection under the law, had been violated through the wilful exclusion of African Americans from juries and grand juries. In Charley Smith v. State of Mississippi 162 U.S. 592 (1896) and John G. Gibson v. State of Mississippi 162 U.S. 565 (1896), Hewlett worked with attorney Cornelius J. Jones to argue that convicted murderers Smith and Gibson had been denied juries of their peers because the juries were empaneled using voter rolls that excluded black citizens. Both cases were dismissed by the court for reasons of lack of jurisdiction; legal scholar R. Volney Riser notes that this may have stemmed from Jones' failure to provide sufficient evidence to interpret the motivations of the Mississippi courts.[19][20] In Brownfield v. North Carolina 189 U.S. 426 (1903), Hewlett worked with attorneys J.L. Mitchell and W.J. Whipper in a case that made similar arguments, again seeking to overturn a murder conviction on the grounds that black jurors had been excluded due to their race or color. In this case, the court concluded that Hewlett and his colleagues had failed to prove that blacks were purposefully excluded from juries by the administration of the law.[21]

In Carter v. Texas 177 U.S. 442 (1900), in which Hewlett served as co-counsel alongside attorney Wilford H. Smith, this tactic was somewhat successful. Smith argued that Seth Carter's indictment for murder should be quashed because no blacks had been chosen to sit on the grand jury that presented it, despite blacks being one-fourth of Galveston, Texas voters. This has been interpreted as a victory for the idea that black defendants were entitled to a jury that included their black peers, making Smith the first African American attorney to successfully argue a case before the Supreme Court; however, the court's decision was narrowly focused on procedure, specifically the fact that Carter had never been given a chance to object to the composition of the grand jury (which had been empaneled before charges were filed against him), in violation of Texas law.[22][23]

In the Ed Johnson case, in which Hewlett acted as co-counsel to Noah Parden, Parden made an argument on equal protection grounds that the trial of Ed Johnson, who faced the death penalty after a conviction for rape, had violated Johnson's Constitutional rights, including through the exclusion of blacks from the jury. Parden succeeded in convincing Justice John Marshall Harlan to stay Johnson's execution until the case could be argued before the full court, but it was never heard because Johnson was taken from the jail in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and lynched.[24] Hewlett did not participate in United States v. Shipp 203 U.S. 563 (1906), the case that resulted from this abrogation of federal authority.[25]

Hewlett also fought against other manifestations of racism and discrimination in his work as an attorney. He filed a number of cases challenging denials of access to public accommodations on his own behalf and for African American clients. In 1884, he sued a steamboat clerk in Washington Police Court after the clerk refused to provide him with the meal to which he was entitled by his ticket. The case was dismissed, with the judge explaining that Hewlett was technically correct, but the government had not "maintained the issue" of enforcing equal access.[26][27] In 1889, Hewlett represented George L. Pryor, a black lawyer from Norfolk, Virginia, in a suit against the doorman at Harris' Bijou Theater in Washington who had seated Pryor and a companion at the back of the theater instead of in the seats they had purchased,[28] and in 1900 he was co-counsel in W.T. Ferguson's case against the management of the Grand Opera House.[29]

Along with other black Washingtonians, Hewlett used the courts to fight against bars and restaurants that were violating the Equal Services Acts of 1872 and 1873, local DC laws that barred racial discrimination in bars and restaurants, by refusing to serve black customers or trying to drive them away through tactics like ignoring them or overcharging them.[30][31] In 1887, he filed a complaint against the popular restaurant Harvey's Oyster House for denying him service. Harvey's was fined $100 but appealed, and eventually the case was dropped.[16] He also pushed back against denial of service in 1907 by alerting the federal marshall in charge of the District of Columbia city hall that a lunchroom in the building had refused to serve him and a black colleague. Although the marshall, who had given the lunchroom operator free use of the space, informed her that discrimination was illegal, she responded by closing the restaurant on the grounds that her white patrons would not share a facility with blacks.[32]

Another issue with which Hewlett was engaged was interracial marriage. In 1890 he served as counsel in the cases of Tutty v. State of Georgia and Ward v. State of Georgia, which stemmed from the marriage of Charles Tutty, a white man, and Rosa Ward Tutty, a black woman. They were married in Washington, DC, but when they returned to their home in Georgia, where interracial marriage was illegal, they were arrested and convicted of fornication. On appeal, the question was whether they were committing fornication because they could not legally marry (the prosecution's argument), or incapable of doing so because they were married (the argument of Hewlett and his co-counsel Judge Parker Jordan). In both cases, the guilty verdict was upheld.[33][34] Hewlett also addressed this issue in his role as justice of the peace. In 1902, he officiated at the wedding of Julia Johnson and George Wilson from Baltimore, who came to Washington and were married in his court because their home state of Maryland prohibited interracial marriage.[35]

In 1915, Hewlett was involved with a class-action reparations case filed by Cornelius J. Jones on behalf of a group of former slaves, asserting ownership of $68 million paid in taxes on cotton produced using slave labor between 1859 and 1868. Jones and the case became the target of harassment from the United States Treasury Department and the Post Office in the fall of 1915. In November, Hewlett publicly declared that he "sees no merit in the suit" and was withdrawing from the case.[36][37]