I want to thank Rebecca Hyman, Reference and Outreach Librarian, and Lisa A. Gregory, Digital Projects Liaison, for their much appreciated assistance and patience with my numerous attempts to read this e-book! This book, An Era of Progress and Promise, was compiled by W.N. Hartshorn of Clifton, Massachusetts to celebrate the “religious, moral, and educational development of the American Negro since his emancipation”.

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Exterior view, LIFE Magazine, 1938

Lynnewood Hall, a century-old stunner of a building just outside Philadelphia, silently, almost invisibly, languishes 200 feet beyond a two-lane blacktop road like a crumbling little Versailles.

The graceful fountain that welcomed hundreds of well-heeled visitors, President Franklin Roosevelt among them, was dismantled and sold years ago. Its once meticulously sculpted French gardens are overgrown with weeds and vines. The classical Indiana limestone facade may have lost its luster but its poise still remains — at least from the other side of rusted wrought iron gates that keep the curious at bay.

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Lutie Lytle

Though Lutie A. Lytle (1871/5-1950) was not the first black woman lawyer in America (the second, in fact), she was the first black woman to practice law in the South, when in 1897, she passed the bar in Tennessee. She then moved to Topeka, Kansas, where she then became the first black woman lawyer in that state. Her path to becoming a lawyer was extraordinary and interesting in and of itself. The child of “Exodusters” (a term applied to black Americans who migrated to Kansas after the end of Reconstruction), Lutie’s interest in politics and the law were fostered by her father John R. Lytle’s involvement in the Populist Party. Though her father’s campaign to become Topeka’s city jailer failed, Lutie entered into Populist politics and was appointed an assistant enrolling clerk for the Kansas legislature.

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