Styles Linton Hutchins (November 1, 1852 – September 7, 1950) was an attorney, politician, and activist in South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee between 1877 (the end of Reconstruction) and 1906 (the height of Jim Crow).[1] Hutchins was among the last African Americans to graduate from the University of South Carolina School of Law in the brief window during Reconstruction when the school was open to Black students and the first Black attorney admitted to practice in Georgia. He practiced law and participated in Georgia and Tennessee politics. He served a single term (1887-1888) in the Tennessee General Assembly as one of its last Black members before an era of entrenched white supremacist policies that lasted until 1965, and advocated for the interests of African Americans. He called for reparations and attempted to identify or create a separate homeland for Blacks. He was a member of the defense team in the 1906 appeal on civil rights grounds by Ed Johnson of a conviction of rape, a case which reached the Supreme Court before it was halted by Johnson's murder by lynching in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Styles Linton Hutchins was born on November 1, 1852, in Lawrenceville, Georgia, the son of William Dougherty Hutchins and an unknown mother.[2] As a slave, Dougherty Hutchins was the legal property of Judge N. L. Hutchins of Lawrenceville, a major slaveowner who is documented in the slave schedule of the 1860 census as owning more than 40 people.[3][4] He bought his freedom around or within a few years of the birth of his son. Dougherty Hutchins established a barbershop at Stone Mountain, Georgia, then relocated to Atlanta, where he became one of a small group of Black barbers who owned their own shops before the Civil War. He continued to own barbershops throughout his life.[5][4] For two years in the early 1880s he formed a partnership with Alonzo Herndon, a fellow barber who would later become an insurance executive and Atlanta's first Black millionaire.[6][7]
Dougherty Hutchins married in 1863 and he and his wife Anna had at least one child, a daughter named Stazier, around 1867. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1887. The 1870 census indicates that in addition to Dougherty and Anna, Styles, and Stazier, the Hutchins household at this time included another young man, nineteen-year-old Alvin Hutchins. [8][9]
According to legal testimony he gave in 1876, Hutchins spent his late teens and early twenties traveling through the Southern United States, visiting Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, and South Carolina.[10] He married Clara (or Clarra) Harris in Glynn County, Georgia, on September 11, 1874, when he was 21 years old.[11] During 1875 he taught school in Laurens County, South Carolina.[10] In December 1876, Hutchins received a Bachelor of Law degree from the University of South Carolina and was admitted to practice before the South Carolina Supreme Court.[12][2]
During 1877 and 1878, Hutchins lived and practiced law in Columbia and Newberry, South Carolina and Atlanta before settling in Darien, Georgia, where he remained until the end of 1881.[13][14][15] In December 1881 newspapers reported that he had been sentenced to two years in prison for the theft of assets that had been entrusted to him.[16][17][18]
In 1883, Hutchins established a legal practice in Chattanooga, Tennessee.[19] Soon afterwards he was divorced from his wife Clara.[18] On May 25, 1887, he married Cora Martin in Chattanooga and they had two children, Viola, born in May 1887, and Stiles Leonard (or Lennard), born in October 1893.[20][21] Cora Hutchins died on November 14, 1895, and was buried at Forest Hills Cemetery in Chattanooga.[22] Three months later, in February 1896, Hutchins married Mattie Smith, who was 23 years his junior.[23][24] They remained married until Hutchins' death in 1950.