Ancestors & Family

The nephew of abolitionist Parker Pillsbury, Albert Pillsbury spent his considerable career as a civil rights lawyer and advocate for social justice. He is best known for drafting the initial constitution and bylaws of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He would also draft one of the first federal bills to outlaw lynching, a template for bills that came later.

In his focus on racial justice, Albert drew from the spirit of his uncle Parker and the town he grew up in, Milford, New Hampshire, which was a prime stop on the Underground Railroad. He admired his uncle to such a degree that he named his only son after him.

While the older Pillsbury focused on ending slavery, Albert focused on addressing the extreme racism and segregation that continued after the Civil War.

Education, the Law, and Advocacy

From Milford, Albert climbed the educational ladder to gain admission to Harvard, class of 1871. Looking to expand his horizon after graduation, he moved to Illinois where he studied law and passed the Illinois bar. Alfred would return to Boston to practice law, and there join the National Negro Committee, the precursor to the NAACP.

Albert spent time with Boston civil rights leaders like black businessman and activist William Trotter and African American educator Maria Baldwin. By coincidence, in 1889 she was the first principal of my children’s elementary school that eventually took her name. He collaborated with NAACP founder Moorfield Storey, with whom he worked in secret on civil rights cases across the South.

Albert was also a close friend of the formerly enslaved Archibald Henry Grimke, the second African American to graduate from Harvard Law School.  Albert shared ties with Grimke through both Harvard and his family. After the Civil War, Grimke had gone to a “freedmen's school,” created soon after the abolition of slavery to educate freedmen. The school was opened by Parker’s brother, Gilbert Pillsbury.  There, Grimke’s talents were recognized by his teachers, who urged him to go to Harvard.

Politics

Like many a lawyer, Albert pursued a second career in state politics. He did so as a Lincoln Republican, elected to the Massachusetts House and then the Senate, where he became its president.

From there he went on to become state Attorney General for six years (1891-1897). Following his tenure as AG, he returned to private practice with a focus on civil rights.

Albert and the NAACP: Its Founding and Early Years

The NAACP was formed in 1913 to promote equality of rights and eradicate racial prejudice among citizens of the United States. Its mission was to “advance the interest of colored citizens, to achieve impartial suffrage, and to increase their opportunities for securing justice in the courts, education for their children, and employment according to their complete equality before the law.”

His generation of civil rights lawyers and activists grew up in the Jim Crow era. Like today most battles were fought in the states. They sought a national vehicle grounded in the local chapters to help states mobilize to combat the extreme voter supersession and segregation of the era.

It was then, Albert, as a prominent lawyer and former Attorney General, well-respected in the civil rights movement of the era, was asked by the NAACP’s founding board to draft its constitution and by-laws.

The Cry to End Lynching

In the 1890s, the explosive investigative journalism of Ida B. Wells documented the terror of lynching. Albert, who had returned to private practice, channeled his legal skills into a drafting federal bill to end it. 

His bill was introduced by the Republican senior senator from Massachusetts, Senator George Hoar, a radical abolitionist and early advocate of rights for women, African Americans and Native Americans.

Albert’s “Hoar Bill” would become the template for future attempts to pass federal anti‐lynching legislation in the United States. In his 2020 article, “Without Due Process: Albert E. Pillsbury and the Hoar Anti-Lynching Bill," historian Adam Burns of the University of Edinburgh called it the most significant federal anti-lynching bill ever drawn up in the United States.

As things stood, many state laws allowed lynch mobs to torment  and murder  black men and women - along with some immigrants of color - that the white mobs accused of a crime. 

It took Ida B. Wells, the Tennessee civil rights leader and journalist from Memphis, to uncover the truth about lynching.  Her widely-read pamphlet, Southern Horrors, gave a true, unvarnished account of the rising violence in the South and state “lynch laws” that “permitted the infliction of punishment by private and unauthorized citizens.”

Wells was posthumously recognized with a Pulitzer Prize in the Special Citations and Awards Category “for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.” 

Albert always believed a federal anti-lynching bill would pass. He made his case in a brief published in the Harvard Law Review that was also published in full in The Crisis magazine, the official publication of the NAACP.

He began his brief by asking the question, “Has the United States power to protect the lives of its citizens to whom it owes protection if the states fail to protect them against mob violence? (such as torture, death or worse).”

Albert maintained that states had denied Black Americans their constitutional rights by failing to protect them from lynch mobs. Consequently, he said, Congress and the federal government had the authority to intervene. Albert grounded his bill in the due process and equality clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which required all states to give equal legal protection to all their citizens.

What could be a clearer example of something that citizens required protection from than the horrific practice of lynching? The confederate states clearly understood that this kind of targeted racial violence was explicitly banned by the 14th Amendment, and would have to outlaw it if they were to regain the benefits of statehood. They chose to allow and even condone it anyway.

Always the realist, Albert would not have been surprised that it took more than 200 attempts over 120 years for Congress to finally take federal action to make it a crime in every state.

Not until 2022 would a federal law finally pass, when President Joe Biden signed into law the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, criminalizing lynching and making it a federal hate crime in all 50 states.

Honored by Howard University

In 1913, Albert  gained national recognition for his life’s work in civil rights and social justice. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the oldest historically black law school in the United States at Howard University.