Born in Decatur, Alabama, in 1893, James Blaine Cashin was the youngest of Herschel Vivian Cashin and Minnie Virginia Cashin’s seven children. Herschel Cashin, himself a distinguished lawyer and Republican member of the Alabama House of Representatives during Reconstruction, was widely regarded as ‘one of the fathers of the Reconstruction in Alabama.’
James Cashin graduated from Fisk University in 1916 with a B.S. degree and, already looking toward a post-war world, three years down the road, garnered high praise for his commencement oration, “The United States and a Constructive Peace.” After an additional year of prelaw at the University of Michigan in 1917, he went on to earn his JD in 1919 from the Chicago-Kent College of Law. The Great War having ended, he enlisted and served in the Illinois National Guard, where he attained the rank of captain.
Cashin set up a law practice in Chicago with his brother-in-law, Carroll N. Langston, and later, in 1923, with two other African American lawyers – Edward H. Morris and Earl B. Dickerson – to form the Morris, Cashin, and Dickerson law firm. The firm represented, among other high-profile clients, the Chicago Defender, for which Cashin served as general counsel and member of the Board of Trustees. This would place him at the center of one pivotal historical moment for Black people in America.
He was a prominent attorney and leader in the civic life of Black Chicago and, by extension, the greater Black community nationally. A former president of the Cook County Bar Association, he was named a member of the Chicago Board of Education in 1942 and, a year later, a member of the Civil Service Commission of Chicago, a post he held until 1947. Cashin was also general counsel of the Metropolitan Mutual Assurance Association and a trustee of the Chicago Defender. This popular newspaper was instrumental in instigating the Great Migration of Black people out of the South. It helped change politics and presidential election outcomes by encouraging African Americans to leave the Republican Party and cast their votes instead for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
On February 19, 1940, Cashin married Hortense Fears of Detroit. The couple would have two children, James, Jr., and Elizabeth.
James B Cashin resigned from the Chicago Defender Board of Trustees in 1950 to devote his time to the Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity of which he was a member and was elected that year to a two-year term as its Grand Sire Archon (Chairman). This oldest predominately Black Greek-letter organization included among its members his former law partners Carroll Langston, Edward H. Morris and many of Chicago’s luminary Black leaders like J. Ernest Wilkins, Harry H. Pace and Percy Julian.
Cashin died of a heart attack at his summer home in Pullman, Michigan, in 1952. He was 57 years old. Hortense Cashin passed away on November 21, 1978, at 72.
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