1st black SIU grad made good in city

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Updated: March 16, 2012 8:20AM

Alexander Lane, the first African-American man to graduate from what would become Southern Illinois University, moved to Chicago in the early 1890s.

Lane enrolled at Rush Medical College, earned his doctor’s degree in 1895 and started a practice on the South Side. Later, he was elected twice to the Illinois House of Representatives, the first time in 1906 — three years before the NAACP was established.

All this clearly qualifies Lane as a trailblazer for African Americans in Illinois, yet one about whom little was known beyond that bare biographical outline.

That was before educators at SIU’s Paul Simon Public Policy Institute made it a point last year to dig deeper.

On Feb. 27, the institute plans to share its research at a reception here, where a new internship in Lane’s honor also will be unveiled. But they agreed to give us a preview.

Lane, it turns out, was born in pre-Civil War Mississippi. The date is unclear. His death certificate says he was born in 1860. Other records place it as early as 1855.

Either way, Lane was born into an America where slavery was still in full force.

His mother, researchers conclude, was a slave. His father was white. No other information is available about the father’s identity, although it’s no secret how those things usually happened in those days.

After the war, the young Lane spent time hanging around a Union Army camp, where he befriended a Union colonel named Lyons, according to a hand-written family history dug up by SIU history prof Pamela Smoot.

Lyons stayed in Mississippi during the early years of Reconstruction, then returned to Illinois, but not before asking permission from Lane’s mom to take the child with him. As the story goes, she agreed — on the condition Lyons provide Lane with an education, a not uncommon arrangement of the period.

Once in Illinois, the colonel turned Lane over to the care of a rich landowner in far southern Perry County — Joseph B. Curlee, and his wife, Margaret. According to Smoot, the Curlees raised Lane as a member of their own family, and most likely made it possible for him to attend what was then Southern Illinois Normal College in 1876, then a training ground for teachers.

After getting his degree, Lane became the first principal at East Side School for Negroes in Carbondale. He stayed 10 years.

Along the way, though, Lane took an interest in medicine and moved his own family to Chicago to enroll at Rush, from which the nation’s first African-American medical student graduated all the way back in 1847.

Lane practiced medicine from his home at 1937 S. Archer, where the Chicago Daily Defender once reported: “He was well and favorably known in the profession and enjoyed the confidence of a lucrative clientele.”

After his death, the Illinois Medical Journal of 1912 noted the passing of the “well-known colored practitioner of Chicago.”

Lane also served as an “assistant physician of Cook County.” The SIU folks can’t say what an assistant physician of Cook County did in those days, but we can deduce it was a political appointment of some sort.

Lane ran for the House in 1906 as a Republican. Under the cumulative voting system in effect at the time, he was elected by finishing third in the balloting. He won again in 1908, making him the only “colored representative” in that year’s Legislature.

Of course, no Chicago political career would be complete without a hint of scandal.

That came Lane’s way in 1909, when he was among nine House members who drew suspicion when they switched their previous votes to elect Republican boss William Lorimer to the U.S. Senate. At the time, senators were selected by state legislatures, not a direct vote of the people.

In a subsequent investigation, some legislators revealed they had been bribed to vote for Lorimer, resulting in him being expelled from the Senate.

Matt Baughman, associate director at the Paul Simon Institute, said there was never any indication by Senate investigators that Lane took a bribe.

But Lane dropped his plans to seek re-election in 1910 and died the following year, his death certificate listing the cause as exhaustion and pneumonia.

I only wish I knew more.