Late civil rights attorney Samuel W. Tucker will be honored with a historical marker in Emporia where he worked as the only Black lawyer in Southside Virginia from 1946 to the early 1960s.

Rodney D. Pierce, a research historian who teaches middle school social studies in the Northampton County School system submitted the application for the marker in October and was notified last week that the Virginia Board of Historic Resources has given approval to honor the Alexandria native. 

“For someone of Mr. Tucker’s stature to not have a marker in the commonwealth was a travesty,” Pierce said. “I’m elated we are going to change that.”

Tucker’s mother was a teacher while his father, a member of the NAACP, was a real estate agent.

“The Department of Historic Resources looks forward to highlighting attorney Samuel W. Tucker near his former law office in Emporia,” said Highway Marker Program Manager Jennifer Loux. “The marker will educate the public about Tucker's decades of advocacy for civil rights, including his leading role in landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases that challenged school segregation.”

He attended kindergarten through eighth-grade in his hometown, but Alexandria had no high school for Black students, so he rode by trolley daily to Washington where he graduated from Armstrong High School.

That he could not attend the local segregated high school for White students in Alexandria remained with Tucker.

Yet it was an episode at the age of 14 that changed his life. 

After refusing to yield their seats in a Whites-only part of a trolley, Tucker and his brothers were brought into police court on charges of disorderly conduct, assault and abusive language following accusations by a White woman. 

A Black attorney named Thomas Watson appealed the fines they incurred and the siblings were found innocent later on by an all-White male jury. 

Galvanized by what he’d experienced, Tucker decided to pursue a legal career. 

He earned a bachelor’s degree from Howard University where he met Charles Hamilton Houston, the institution’s law school dean who would later earn the title The Man Who Killed Jim Crow as the NAACP’s first special counsel. 

Unable to attend law schools in Virginia due to race restrictions, Tucker studied law under Watson and passed the bar in 1934.  

Disturbed he could not utilize the segregated library in his hometown, despite it being funded by Black taxpayers, Tucker recruited and trained five young Black men in organizing the Alexandria sit-in strike in 1939, an event that drew national press attention, especially from Black newspapers. 

Tucker would defend the group in court and get charges of disorderly conduct dropped against them while a branch library for Blacks was built. 

Tucker was still not satisfied as Black Alexandrians were still not permitted to use the local library for White patrons. The Alexandria sit-in strike has a historical marker. 

Tucker later served as a major with the 366th Infantry during World War II, seeing combat in Italy. He determined Alexandria had too many Black lawyers after returning home from the war, and moved to Emporia in 1946.

African-Americans were the majority in the commonwealth’s Southside region, but were largely vulnerable, Pierce said.

In a June 2000 article in The Washington Post by Tucker biographer S.W. Ackerman said, “Southside justice was lily white. There were no black judges, no black prosecutors, no black lawyers and no black jurors – only black defendants.”

During his time in Greensville County, Tucker became involved with the NAACP in the case of the Martinsville Seven — seven Black men convicted of raping a White woman. 

Tucker tried to overturn the death sentence by arguing that the commonwealth had executed 45 Black men for raping White women since 1908, but no White men had been executed for rape. His argument as no court repealed the sentencing. 

As he became more involved with the NAACP, Tucker drew the ire of the commonwealth’s state legislature, which unsuccessfully tried to use legislation crafted in the late 1950s to disbar him and other NAACP cooperating attorneys. 

Tucker went on to form the law firm of Tucker and Marsh in Richmond in the early 1960s. Late civil rights attorney Oliver Hill would join in 1966, and the firm was later renamed Hill, Tucker and Marsh. 

Tucker co-authored the brief for the United States Supreme Court case Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County in 1964 where the court held that the board’s decision to close all local public schools and provide vouchers to attend private schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 

He successfully argued Wright v. Council of the City of Emporia before the USSC in 1968. 

In that case, the court decided if Emporia were allowed to establish an independent city school system, Black students remaining in the county schools would be deprived of a system where all vestiges of racial segregation had been eliminated. 

Tucker won again before the USSC in 1972 in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, with the justices deciding the plan the school board enacted for voluntary desegregation which allowed White students to attend private academies at public expense was an inadequate remedy as school boards had an affirmative duty to desegregate their schools. 

Tucker’s activities drew the ire of the White legal establishment, which unsuccessfully tried to disbar him. 

Tucker was Virginia’s leading attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, which named him Lawyer of the Year in 1966. 

The following year, Tucker had about 150 civil rights cases before state and federal courts. He chaired the NAACP Virginia State Conference’s legal staff and sat on the organization’s National Board of Directors. 

In 1976, the NAACP honored Tucker with the William Robert Ming Advocacy Award for the spirit of financial and personal sacrifice displayed in his legal work. 

Tucker died in 1990 survived by his wife Julia. They had no children. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. 

In 1998, the city of Emporia dedicated a monument in Tucker’s honor. Two years later, Alexandria dedicated a new elementary school in his name. 

That same year, despite controversy, the Richmond City Council voted to rename the bridge formerly named after Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart after Tucker. 

And in 2001, the Virginia State Bar’s Young Lawyers Conference implemented the Oliver Hill/Samuel Tucker Institute, which seeks to reach future lawyers, and in particular minority candidates, at an early age to provide them with exposure and opportunity to explore the legal profession.