"Charlotte E. Ray" [1850-1911]

Was born in New York City on January 12. Her parents, Charles Bennett Ray  and Charlotte

Augusta Burroughs Ray, had seven children, two died as teenagers. The Ray household placed a high value on education and work for social justice.Charles a man of mixed African, Native American, European was a minister at New York's Bethesda Congregational Church, and editor of the Colored American, an abolitionist newspaper.Charlotte Augusta,Charles second wife was also an anti-slaverly activists who worked with her husband to help escaped slaves travel north to freedom on the underground railroad.The Rays believed strongly that African American children needed education in order to inprove their lives, and they worked hard to ensure that all of their children graduated from college, an unusual achievement for a black family in the nineteeth century.For education,she had to move too Washington, D.C.., in the mid 1860s to attend the Institution for the Education of Colored Youth, one of the few schools where African Americans could obtain an academic education.The Institution had been founded in 1851 by a white educator named Myrtilla Miner,with the help of abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher and his cousin Harriet Beecher Stowe.Myrtilla had taught school in Mississippi until she was refused permission to admit black children into her class. Moving to the nation's capitol,she opened the Normal School for Colored Girls, which in 1865 became the Institution for the Education of Colored Youth.After completing her studies in 1869, Charlotte began to teach classes Howard University Normal and Preparatory Department,which trained students to become elementary and prepared them for classes in the Collegiate department.Another African American student,Mary Ann Shadd Carey,who entered Howard law school during the early 1970s,was not permitted to graduate.Mary believed that the Howard administration discriminated against her because she was a woman.When Charlotte applied to enter Howard's newly established School of Law in 1872,she filled her application under the name "C.E.Ray."Some historians believe that she did this to conceal the fact that she was a woman,in case that might influence school administrators to refuse her application.Others point out that many post-slavery blacks used only their initials because they did not want whites or others in authority to be tempted to call them by their first names, as they had during the era of slavery.There is no way to be sure why she used her initials on her application.For the next three years,Charlotte pursued a demanding course of study,impressing her fellow students and teachers alike with her quick grasp of legal complexities.James Carroll Napier  a respected lawyer and one of Charlotte Howard classmates, called her, an apt scholar,"and General Oliver O. Howard,one of the university's founders,described her as,colored woman who read us a thesis on corporations,not copied from the books but from her brain, a clear incisive analysis of one of the most delicate legal questions."Charlotte specialized in business law and became highly regarded as an expert in the legal issues of corporations.Her academic skill was recognized by her membership in the prestigious society. Phi Beta Kappa. When she graduated in 1872, Charlotte became the first African-American woman to graduate from a law school in the United States.Upon finishing law school,she became the first black woman lawyer to enter Washington D.C. bar which not long before,had removed the requirement that applicants must be men. She was was  only the third woman in the entire nation to be admitted to the bar.Charlotte set up a business law practice,advertising in a local newspaper published by famous abolitionist Frederick Douglas,New National Era and Citizen... Soon she earned a reputation as a skilled and knowledgeable corporation lawyer.In addition to her commercial practice,she filed at least one suit in family law,a divorce petition on behalf of an abused wife.She was generally thought to be an excellent commercial and courtroom lawyer, Charlotte found herself, as a woman and anAfrican American,unable to attract enough clients to support herself.White clients seldom chose a black attorney,and African Americans who could afford a lawyer were reluctant to hire a woman. A nationwide economic depression, ushered in by the Panic of 1873,also made it a difficult time to start a new business.After trying for several years to establish a legal practice,Charlotte was forced to give up.She returned to New York,where she joined her two surviving sisters working as a teacher in the Brooklyn public school system.Little is known of Charlotte later life. She continued to work for social change,attending the national convention the Nation Women's Suffrage Association and joining the National Association of Colored Women.During the late 1880s,she married a man with the last name of Fraim, and in 1897 Charlotte moved to the town of Woodside, New York, in the borough of Queens.She died there from a severe case of bronchitis.