Did you know that the first Black judge elected in Florida after Reconstruction was a two-time HBCU graduate who earned his law degree at the top of his class? His name was James Dean, and his story is one of triumph, injustice, and a vindication that took more than a century to arrive.
Dean was born on February 14, 1858, in Ocala, Florida. He pursued his education during the Reconstruction era, first graduating from Cookman Institute in Jacksonville, the historically Black school that would later become Bethune-Cookman University. From there he went on to Howard University in Washington, D.C., another historically Black institution, where he studied law. According to the State Archives of Florida, Dean earned a Master of Laws degree from Howard in 1884 as the valedictorian of his class and was admitted to the bar of the United States Supreme Court that same year.
On November 6, 1888, the people of Monroe County elected James Dean county judge. When he took office in January 1889, he became Florida’s first Black judge and, as historians note, the first Black judge elected anywhere in the South after Reconstruction. It was a remarkable achievement in a state and a region still hardening into Jim Crow.
His time on the bench was cut short. As the Florida Bar reported, Governor Francis P. Fleming suspended Dean in 1889 on the false charge that he had issued a marriage license to an interracial couple. The couple, Antonio Gonzalez and Annie Maloney, were both of Black Cuban descent, and the marriage was lawful. Dean was removed anyway, without the Senate hearing the law required, and a successor was appointed in his place…