Carrying on a Legacy of Firsts
He remembered hard times during the Depression, but he didn’t ever go hungry. Perhaps because his stepfather was a government meat inspector, he could make snacks for himself from the beef tenderloin in the refrigerator. He yearned for, and got, a bicycle, though a used one, when many had little.
Judge Stephen L. Maxwell carried on his family’s legacy of community service in the many roles he played in the life of St. Paul, Minnesota. Maxwell’s grandfather, Henry Johnson Maxwell, born in 1837 on Edisto Island, South Carolina, tried to volunteer for the Union Army in Massachusetts but was twice rejected for medical reasons. Finally accepted into a regiment of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) in 1864, he served in the light artillery that was critical in repulsing Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s attack on the Union Army supply depot at Johnsonville, Tennessee. He then joined the USCT troops that marched into “a perfect slaughter pen” to route General John Bell Hood’s advance on Nashville, Tennessee in December 1864. He also became perhaps the first African American postmaster in the United States in 1869, after being elected to the state senate in South Carolina in 1868.
Judge Maxwell’s father moved from South Carolina to St. Paul, where he worked as a barber. His mother, a native St. Paulite whose father was a doctor of osteopathy, earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Minnesota, eventually moving to teach at Atlanta University after her husband’s death in 1930. She played an active role in the NAACP in the 1930s and 1940s, with a focus on supporting the federal Fair Employment Practices Commission.
Judge Maxwell was born in 1921. He had a perhaps unusual childhood for an African American in St. Paul, because he was raised in a neighborhood near Concordia and Snelling Avenues with no African Americans, and he was the only African American at Gordon Grade School and Maria Sanford Junior High School when he attended. Though he graduated from Central High School in St. Paul in 1939, he also spent some time at the Atlanta University Laboratory High School and the Tuskegee Institute, when he moved with his mother to Atlanta for her teaching career.
Maxwell put himself through Morehouse College with a series of odd jobs such as cleaning latrines, and graduated in 1942. He and friends began a post-commencement journey up the East Coast, but he returned to St. Paul after receiving his mother’s telegram indicating that the draft board was looking for him. Wanting to join the Coast Guard, he had to journey to Chicago because the St. Paul office of the Coast Guard was not accepting African Americans in 1942. He served on the Coast Guard’s beach patrol in Delaware and New Jersey, stationed there to prevent a German invasion, and then as a medical corpsman until he was discharged on July 13, 1945. Though he was in an integrated unit in the Coast Guard, there was tension with the white enlisted men, who were all from the South. In 1948, he joined the Naval Reserves, where he was promoted to captain in 1974.
Unsure about what he should do when he returned to St. Paul in 1945, Judge Maxwell took the federal civil service exam, scoring an impressive 95.5 to which 10 points was added for his military service. He was hired by the Bureau of Internal Revenue, but after 18 months, he applied to the University of Minnesota, planning to become a medical doctor. Because he was shy one class in physics, however, he never matriculated, but instead returned to the Internal Revenue Service and then the St. Paul Municipal Auditorium where he worked as an accountant before joining the Office of Price Stabilization in 1953 as an investigator.
Practicing Law in the Public Interest
Judge Maxwell attended St. Paul College of Law, beginning in 1949. After he passed the bar, he opened a private practice and became active in the Republican Party. Among his clients was the St. Paul NAACP; and he won the first significant civil rights judgment of $800 for two African American men who were refused service at a bar in Dakota County. When William Randall was elected county attorney in November 1958, he persuaded Maxwell to come to work for him as an assistant county attorney.
Judge Maxwell assisted in or led the prosecution of some of the most notorious criminal cases of that time. One involved T. Eugene Thompson (SPCL ‘55), a lawyer who was convicted of hiring a contract killer, Norman Mastrian, to kill his wife. Another was the 1960 prosecution of Rocky Lupino and John Azzone, convicted in the kidnapping of their partner in crime, Tony DeVito, who was never found and presumed murdered by the two men. An accomplice testified that Lupino and Azzone determined to kill DeVito because he had implicated them in a South Carolina burglary. He told the sensational story that the two defendants had strangled DeVito, covered his naked body with lye, and thrown him into a swamp near St. Paul after sprinkling red pepper on the site to discourage dogs from digging up the body.
Maxwell would go on to be appointed city attorney and corporation counsel for the City of St. Paul under Republican Mayor George Vavoulis until 1966, when the city council turned from majority Republican to Democratic.
Undaunted and still committed to public service, in 1966, Judge Maxwell ran as the Republican candidate for the Fourth District, comprising Ramsey and Washington Counties, and he may have been the first African American to run for Congress in Minnesota. He was defeated by Joe Karth, who became a seven-term congressman, by about 11,300 votes. After his defeat, he returned to do civil work for the city of St. Paul under Randall until he was appointed a municipal judge in 1967, the second African American judge to be appointed after Judge L. Edward Bennett in Minneapolis. He was then the first African American to be appointed to a district court judgeship by Governor Harold LeVander.
Going on the bench did not limit Judge Maxwell’s commitment to community service. He served on many community boards, including United Way, the American Red Cross—St. Paul Chapter, St. John’s University, the Boy Scouts Indianhead Council, and the YMCA National Council. He was the first African American chair of the Northern Regional Medical Program. Judge Maxwell retired from the bench in 1987. He died on August 31, 2009.
Judge Maxwell once told a reporter, “You can, in fact succeed in what I call the mainstream. But it takes first-class preparation, it takes diligence of purpose, and it takes courage.”
References
* The quotations in this biography are taken from the references below
Minnesota Historical Society, Minnesota Black History Project: Interview with Stephen L. Maxwell (June 14, 1974), available at http://collections.mnhs.org/cms/display?irn=10445839
100 Who Made a Difference (William Mitchell College of Law, 2001)
Jessica Thompson, Minnesota’s Legal Hall of Fame, Minn. L. & Pol., Aug./Sept. 2007 at 18, 31
American Battlefield Trust, Civil War History Brief, Battle of Johnsonville, Tennessee, available at https://www.battlefields.org/learn/civil-war/battles/johnsonville
American Battlefield Trust, Greg Biggs, The Battle of Nashville: The Crushing Blow of a Forlorn Hope, available at https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/battle-nashville
State v. Lupino, 268 Minn. 344, 129 N.W.2d 294 (1964)