Joseph Thomas Newsome (2 June 1869–8 March 1942), attorney and civic leader, was born in Sussex County and was the son of Joseph Thomas Newsome and Ann Cary Newsome, both of whom had been enslaved. He probably attended the segregated public schools in Sussex before he enrolled in Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute (later Virginia State College and still later Virginia State University), where he gained a reputation as a skilled orator by the time he graduated in 1894. Newsome taught school in Sussex County for three years. With the encouragement of Richard Watson Arnold, a local white businessman, attorney, Republican politician, and the former enslaver of Newsome's mother, he enrolled in the law school at Howard University, in Washington, D.C. Newsome graduated in 1899, passed the bar examination in Washington, and returned to Sussex, where he qualified to practice in the county court in November 1899. In Petersburg, on 27 December 1899, he married Mary Beatrice Winfield, who was also a graduate of Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute. They settled in Newport News the following year and had one daughter.
J. Thomas Newsome, or Lawyer Newsome, as he was often called, became one of the most effective African American civic leaders in southeastern Virginia. He was a founder of Trinity Baptist Church and was a leader in the Newport News Negro Business League, serving as its president in 1910. He petitioned the city council for a high school for African American students in Newport News and later secured the land for the construction of Huntington High School. In 1923 he was a founding member of the Tidewater Bar Association, the state's first organization of Black attorneys who were denied admittance to white legal associations, and in 1938 he was president of the local bar association. During the 1930s Newsome helped organize the Voters League in Warwick County (later a part of Newport News).
Newsome's appearances in court were oftentimes news. In 1912 he and African American attorney George Washington Fields represented sixteen-year-old Virginia Christian at her trial for the murder of her white employer. Their attempts to reverse her guilty verdict and to obtain a pardon from the governor failed, and the state's execution of a female juvenile was national news. In September 1920, Newsome successfully defended an African American man on trial for killing a white sailor. The next month he defended a man accused of killing another African American man in Accomack County. Newsome was reportedly the first Black attorney to appear in a capital case in the courthouse there and a large crowd, including several white attorneys and the state senator from the district, were in attendance. One of the lawyers offered Newsome use of his law books and telephone, and they all praised his arguments and ability. In April 1926, Newsome attracted national attention when he helped secure a conviction and $600 fine of a white Norfolk grocer who had killed an eleven-year-old African American boy.
An advocate for the rights of African Americans, Newsome spoke at a convention called after white Republicans refused to treat Black delegates equally at the party's state convention in March 1920. He declared that Black Republicans were the only true party members in the southern states, and he was named an alternate delegate to the Republican National Convention, which he attended in Chicago in June. The following year, after the state convention again refused to seat most of the African American delegates elected to it, a group of men and women nominated an all-African American slate of candidates for all of the statewide offices to oppose the Democratic nominees and what they called the Lily White Republican candidates. Newsome was the candidate for attorney general on what was called the Lily Black Republican ticket. It was a symbolic protest, not a serious challenge to either party, and Newsome received only 6,609 votes out of more than 207,000 cast in November 1921, about 3 percent of the total number.
Following the death of Matthew Nathaniel Lewis, the publisher and editor of the Newport News Star, in December 1926, Newsome became the weekly newspaper's editorialist. Reaching a wide audience across Hampton Roads, he stressed the importance of education, demanded equal rights under the law, called for a federal law against lynching, and urged interracial cooperation as the only effective way to preserve American democracy. The Norfolk Journal and Guide bought the Star and consolidated the two newspapers in November 1940. About that same time, Newsome joined the Journal and Guide as a regular columnist. In his final column, written shortly after the United States entered World War II, he lauded the patriotism of African Americans in the face of America's failure to guarantee the equal rights of all its citizens.
In 1931, Newsome and Andrew William Ernest Bassette Jr., another African American attorney, successfully argued in an appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals that applicants to register to vote could not be disqualified because they incorrectly answered questions unrelated to their legal qualifications to register. Davis v. Allen struck down a common tool that registrars used to disqualify African American applicants by asking them irrelevant questions, although some registrars continued to employ such tactics for years. In February 1932, in a speech on "The Political Needs of the Negro," to the Faculty Study Club at Virginia State College, Newsome argued that voting was essential for making any genuine progress. "He is free and yet a slave," Newsome declared. "He is a man; and yet of those great human rights which should be the common possession of every freeman he finds himself almost entirely emasculated."
Newsome also agitated for protection of women. At a meeting of an interracial committee in Newport News in June 1924, he rose to speak after white men had congratulated people for cleaning up trash in the city. According to a news report, "Lawyer Newsome threw a bomb and created a sensation" by dismissing the reported progress as inconsequential and demanding protection for African American girls and women, whom he argued were well known to have been "the foot mat for the beasts of both races for generations."
In October 1941, Newsome served alongside a white lawyer as defense attorney for Lindsay Smith, a young African American who was charged with killing a white soldier stationed at Fort Eustis. Smith admitted that he had shot the man, one of two soldiers whom he had encountered harassing several African American girls. The soldiers chased Smith to his house and threatened him. Smith warned them not to enter the house, but when one of the soldiers mounted the steps, Smith killed him with a shotgun. Newsome closed his argument to the jury by stating, "Don't be afraid to give the defendant just such treatment as you would give a white man—a verdict of acquittal…." The jury convicted Smith of involuntary manslaughter, but Newsome and his co-counsel moved that the verdict be set aside both because Smith was entitled under the law to use force to protect his own life and also because the prosecution did not call the second soldier as a witness. In December the judge set aside the verdict and freed Smith.
The governor appointed Newsome in November 1941 to the regional defense council that coordinated civilian defense work in sixteen counties and seven cities in southeastern Virginia, including the Eastern Shore. He became a master in chancery in Newport News in 1940 and practiced law until his death. Joseph Thomas Newsome died of pneumonia at his home in Newport News on 8 March 1942 and was buried in Pleasant Shade Cemetery, in Hampton. More than 800 mourners attended his funeral at First Baptist Church, with about 2,000 others present outside the church during the service. The editors of the two local white newspapers praised him and singled out for commendation his work ethic, and leaders of the bar of both races praised his character and abilities, his contributions to the community, and his work on behalf of African Americans. In 1990, restoration work began on Newsome's house with appropriations from the city and the General Assembly, transforming it into a museum and community center. The house was included on the Virginia Landmarks Register in 1989 and the National Register of Historic Places in 1990.
Sources Consulted:
Biographical and family history information, including birth date, in Newsome House Museum and Community Center, Newport News; variant June 1872 on Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS) Death Certificate (Newport News) and gravestone, Pleasant Shade Cemetery, Hampton; biographical feature articles in Alexander's Magazine 1 (Apr. 1906):30–31 (portrait) and Norfolk Journal and Guide, 14 Mar. 1942; United States Census Schedules, Sussex Co., 1870 (age one), 1880 (age ten), Elizabeth City Co., 1900 (born June 1869), Newport News, 1910 (age forty), 1920 (age fifty), 1930 (age fifty-six), 1940 (age sixty-eight), Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; BVS Marriage Register, Petersburg (with first name Joseph and age twenty-eight in Dec. 1899); election return in Annual Report of the Secretary of the Commonwealth…for the Year Ending September 30, 1921 (1922), 419–422; W. E. Davis v. Thomas C. Allen, Registrar (1931), Virginia Reports, 157:84–93; Virginia State College Gazette, 37, Faculty Study Club Number (Jan. 1933), 13–15 (first quotation on 13); Richmond Planet, 6 Nov. 1920; Norfolk Journal and Guide, 7 June 1924 (second quotation), 3 Apr. 1926, 25 Oct. 1941 (third quotation), 27 Dec. 1941; Newsome's editorials in incomplete run of Newport News Star, Library of Virginia; Newport News Daily Press, 18 Dec. 1941; obituaries in Newport News Daily Press and Newport News Times-Herald, both 9 Mar. 1942; obituaries, memorials, and account of funeral in Norfolk Journal and Guide, 14 Mar. 1942; editorial tributes in Newport News Daily Press and Newport News Times-Herald, both 10 Mar. 1942, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, 14 Mar. 1942.
Photograph in Alexander's Magazine, Apr. 1906.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Brent Tarter.
How to cite this page:
Brent Tarter, "Joseph Thomas Newsome (1869–1942)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2023 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Newsome_J_Thomas, accessed [today's date]).
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