In 1935—a time when the only jobs Negros could obtain in Kalamazoo, Michigan were as custodians, maids, chauffeurs, or hot asphalt pourers—a young and ambitious Charles Pratt returned to his hometown after graduating from Howard University Law School. He was eager to put his hard work into practice and make a name for himself as an attorney. “I was not invited into a firm,” Pratt said in a speech at Grand Valley State University in the early 1980s.1 “One lawyer told me that now the colored people had a lawyer of their own. I told him that I was not a lawyer for the colored people, but for all the people. That I was a Negro but did not want to be restricted because of that fact.”