Harold E. Bledsoe ’25
Long before racial inequality was a widely recognized part of the American lexicon, attorney Harold Bledsoe, who died in 1974, was working on issues that impacted his fellow black attorneys and the African American community-at-large.
Bledsoe, a 1925 graduate of the University of Detroit, refused to accept the disparity between Michigan’s black lawyers and the established legal community. Rather than be stymied by the situation, Bledsoe saw it as an opportunity to challenge the status quo.
The late Judge Wade H. McCree, the first black jurist to sit on the United States Court of Appeals for the sixth district, lauded Bledsoe as a mentor who opened the door for others.
“When none of the big law firms would even give me an interview because of my race, Harold Bledsoe opened his office to me and dozens of others,” McCree commented in the Wayne Law Review article, “Black Legal History.”
Bledsoe’s granddaughter, Judge Deborah Bledsoe Ford, who sits on the 36th District Court in Detroit, remembers her grandfather’s stories about growing up in Marshall, Texas as the child of well-off landowners.
“He started out a little bit differently (than many black children of his generation.) His grandparents were slaves but his parents were not. His father was educated at Bishop College and became a landowner. He was very well to do, and sent my grandfather to undergrad and law school,” Bledsoe-Ford said. “My grandmother told me he went to law school because he saw so much terrible discrimination that he decided he wanted to use his legal skills to make a difference.”
After Bledsoe graduated from Detroit Mercy Law, he chose to remain in Detroit where he became involved in local and state politics.
“Following his first year of law school at Howard University, my grandfather came to Detroit for a summer apprenticeship because it was a booming city,” said Bledsoe-Ford. “It turned out that he thought it was such a good place that he transferred schools.”
As Bledsoe became more involved in politics, he took on a number of leadership roles in the Democratic Party. When he was appointed to the Michigan Workmen’s Compensation Study Commission, as it was then called, he helped draft Michigan’s first Workmen’s Compensation Act Program. Then, in 1934, Bledsoe was appointed as the state’s first black assistant attorney general.
Throughout his career, Bledsoe remained steadfast in his commitment to social justice for his colleagues, clients and the residents of Detroit.
“Those who were active in politics had to be willing to pay the freight for the race’s political emancipation. No other organizations were willing to underwrite our movement, which I think was one of the midwives that gave birth to the Negro’s hopes in organized labor,” Bledsoe was quoted as saying in a 1963 interview in the “Michigan Chronicle.”
A member of the Electoral College, Bledsoe was the first person of color in the country to cast an electoral vote for the re-election of President Franklin Roosevelt.
“My grandfather thought politics were the best way to access power so he became active with the Democratic Party. At the time more blacks were Republicans because of Lincoln,” Bledsoe-Ford said. “He thought there was more opportunity in the Democratic Party and he got really successful with that.”
Often called “Mr. Black Democrat” and “Father of the Black Lawyer,” Bledsoe’s legal skills won him accolades from his clients, the judiciary, and academia.
One of those accolades is something Bledsoe’s granddaughter will always remember.
“Many years ago, when I walked into a courtroom the judge said, ‘Let me tell you who her grandfather was. When I was a student at the University of Michigan, my evidence professor told us that we were not going to class that day. Instead, we were going to watch Harold Bledsoe try a case. Our professor let us know that he could not possibly teach us more than we could learn from watching him.’”
“To take a white man and say, ‘Go look at this black man because he can teach you more than I can.’ That’s huge. I will never forget that,” Bledsoe-Ford said.