Robert Lee Bailey

Robert Lee Bailey was a successful Indianapolis lawyer and active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He fought tirelessly against segregation and discrimination throughout his life [1]. Bailey was born in Alabama in 1885. After graduation from Talladega College, he moved north for job opportunities. In 1912, he graduated from the Indiana University School of Law [2]. Prior to entering law school, he worked as a railway mail clerk. During this time, he founded the National Alliance of Postal Employees, and later served as their general counsel [3]. During the 1920s and ‘30s, he served as a special judge in the Marion Circuit Court, ran for state representative, and was involved with several organizations and movements [4]. Among his many activities, he was involved with the Bethel Church, Southern Cross Lodge, No. 39, F. and A.M., where he was past master. He was also the chairman of the committee on foreign relations for the Indiana Grand Lodge F. and A.M., chairman of the redress committee for the Indiana NAACP, and a local NAACP branch president [5].

During the height of Indiana’s Ku Klux Klan activity in the 1920s, Bailey helped lead the Indianapolis NAACP against the growing power of the Klan. Mirroring the Klan’s rapid growth during this decade, the Indianapolis branch of the NAACP grew considerably under the leadership of Bailey and fellow lawyers Robert Lee Brokenburr, W.S. Henry, and Freeman Ransom [6]. Bailey was involved in several critical moments in Indianapolis’s African American Civil Rights history.

In the early 1920s, Bailey represented NAACP in court, asking the Indianapolis school board to reconsider their decision to build an all-black high school. Bailey and two African American lawyers asked for an injunction, believing the proposed school promoted segregation and unequal opportunities for Indianapolis’s African American students [7]. Despite pleas from the NAACP, Crispus Attucks High School opened in September 1927 [8].

In 1931, Indiana Attorney General James Ogden appointed Bailey as the assistant attorney general. He was the first African American to hold the position. In the same year, Bailey faced one of his most difficult cases. Brokenburr and Bailey defended James Cameron, a sixteen-year-old boy from Marion, Indiana, who had been charged with murder. Cameron’s friends, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, were beaten and hanged in what is known as the last lynching in Indiana’s history. Cameron narrowly escaped the same fate. If found guilty by the all-white jury, he faced life in prison or the death penalty. Bailey and Brokenburr provided evidence to reduce Cameron’s charges. He was found guilty as an accessory to voluntary manslaughter and served two years in the Indiana State Reformatory [9]. While Cameron’s narrow escape from the lynch mob was unique, lynching in Indiana was not. Besides Shipp and Smith, at least seven other African American men were lynched in Indiana between 1890 and 1902 [10].

Robert Bailey died in 1940 [11]. Newspaper accounts of his death remembered him as “one of the most brilliant attorneys ever to practice in the Indiana courts,” and an “honorable, straightforward…splendid citizen" [12]. Robert Lee Bailey was most known for his love for battle in the courtroom, which was “surpassed only by his thirst for justice" [13].

[1] “Our Branch History,” Indy NAACP, accessed March 19, 2021, https://www.indynaacp.org/branch-history.
[2] Ryan Schwier and Ravay Smith, “’Thirst for Justice’: Indiana’s Pioneering Black Lawyers,” Indiana Legal Archive, February 23, 2015, http://www.indianalegalarchive.com/journal/2015/2/18/thirst-for-justice.
[3] “Great Man Who Had Thirst for Justice,” Indianapolis Recorder (Indianapolis, IN), March 9, 1940.
[4] Ryan Schwier and Ravay Smith, “’Thirst for Justice’: Indiana’s Pioneering Black Lawyers.”
[5] “Great Man Who Had Thirst for Justice,” Indianapolis Recorder.
[6] Emma Lou Thornbrough, Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century (Indiana University Press, 2000), 49. [7] Emma Lou Thornbrough, 57.
[8] Emma Lou Thornbrough, 58.
[9] Ryan Schwier and Ravay Smith, “’Thirst for Justice’: Indiana’s Pioneering Black Lawyers.”
[10] “Indiana Lynching Victims Memorial,” America’s Black Holocaust Museum, accessed March 22, 2021, https://www.abhmuseum.org/indiana-lynching-victims-memorial/.
[11] “Great Man Who Had Thirst for Justice,” Indianapolis Recorder.
[12] “Bailey’s Death Brings Grief to Multitudes,” Indianapolis Recorder (Indianapolis, IN), March 9, 1940.
[13] “Great Man Who Had Thirst for Justice,” Indianapolis Recorder.

Student Author: Gwyneth Harris
Faculty/Staff Editors: Dr. Ronald V. Morris, Dr. Kevin C. Nolan, and Christine Thompson
Graduate Assistant Researchers: Carrie Vachon and JB Bilbrey

PHOTO & VIDEO:
Courtesy Indiana University https://indianamemory.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/IUPUIphotos/id/31228/rec/1