Austen Thomas Walden, also known as A.T. Walden (April 12, 1885 - July 2, 1965) was an American lawyer in Atlanta, Georgia who worked on many civil rights cases, campaigns for voter registration by African Americans, and building collaboration with the white power structure. In 1964m he was appointed by the mayor of Atlanta as a municipal judge, the first black judge to be appointed in the state of Georgia since Reconstruction.
Undeterred by the segregated law school in Georgia, Walden went to Michigan and earned his law degree from the University of Michigan. He returned to Georgia in 1911 to rehearse as one of the few black lawyers in the state through the 1940s and 1950s. He played a critical role in achieving equal pay for black schoolteachers in Atlanta in 1943, filing a suit in federal court. In 1952 he represented Horace Ward in the first legal challenge to seek admission by a black student to the all-white University of Georgia Law School.
Walden became known as a southern civil rights leader, in some cases serving as a local lawyer for the NAACP in cases in which it had national leadership. From 1946 he was active in leading efforts to get blacks registered to vote in the city of Atlanta and contributed to numerous political and civic organizations. A major power broker in the city, he worked effectively with business people and political leaders.
Early life
Austin Thomas Walden was born in Fort Valley, Georgia on April 12, 1885. His parents, Jennie Tomlin and Jeff Walden had been children when emancipated from slavery after the American Civil War. Walden attended segregated schools.
In 1907 Walden graduated from Atlanta University, a historically black college. Because of segregation, Walden used a Georgia "out-of-state scholarship" and went to Michigan. (Georgia provided scholarships to black students to attend professional and graduate schools that the state did not provide.) He earned his law degree from the University of Michigan Law School in 1911. (This practice of the state's offering scholarships, because it refused to admit black residents to its segregated law schools, was ruled unconstitutional in 1938 in the "Gaines" case.)
For a short time, Walden practiced law in Macon, Georgia before he joined the US Army in 1917 with the United States' entry into the Great War. Walden was commissioned as a captain and served as an assistant judge advocate. He received an honorable discharge in 1919 when he settled in Atlanta and began his own law practice.
In May 1918, Walden married Mary Ellen Denner, a public school teacher from Baltimore. They had two daughters, Jenelsie and Austella.
Legal career
As an attorney, Walden often represented black professionals who had been racially persecuted because of their middle-class status. In 1927, a reputable black dentist in Atlanta was beaten after riding a streetcar and refusing to get off so the driver could have a drinking party. He was charged with disorderly conduct, and Walden successfully gained the dropping of these charges.
In another case, Walden, along with A.W. Ricks, represented Dr. and Mrs. C.A. Spence, who was beaten by a streetcar conductor after a dispute over a transfer. After months at trial, the Spences were acquitted of all criminal charges. Unsatisfied with the injustice the Spences suffered, Walden and Ricks filed a civil action for damages against the streetcar company in a revolutionary turn of events. They won damages for the Spences for $1,500.
Walden was also successful in a federal legal suit, lasting six years, which gained equal pay for black public school teachers in Atlanta in 1943. In the early 1900s, the Board of Education had raised salaries of white teachers by cutting those of blacks. The NAACP entered the continuing struggle, and Walden filed suit in federal district court on behalf of a black teacher. This case signaled the acceptance of federal courts of school civil rights cases.
As one of the few black lawyers in Georgia, Walden frequently worked with the national legal team of the NAACP, led by Thurgood Marshall, when the organization became involved in a civil rights case. In 1948, while in communication with the NAACP, Walden did not get directly involved in the case of the Death of Robert Mallard in Lyons, Georgia, as his widow had already hired an attorney. Rather than pursuing what had been described as a white mob that stopped the Mallard car and shot Mr. Mallard, the local sheriff arrested Mrs. Mallard on suspicion of murder. At the national level, the NAACP added the local law officials' inadequate investigation to its argument for federal anti-lynching legislation.