William C. McCard, lawyer and realtor, was one of a handful of African American lawyers in early twentieth-century Baltimore, Maryland, who leveraged their positions as officers of the Court to defend the rights of those in the Black community. William McCard was born in 1871, the second of four children of James W. McCard and Elizabeth C. (Williams) McCard in Rockford, Illinois. He graduated from Rockford High School and received his B.A. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1893, before moving to Chicago, where he earned a law degree, LL.B., from Northwestern University.
As a lawyer, McCard defended the rights of the oppressed, challenging discrimination, lynching in the 1900s, and housing segregation in the early to mid-1910s. The eminent Charles H. Houston, lawyer, legal scholar, and first general counsel of the NAACP, said of him and contemporaries like William Ashbie Hawkins, Cornelius C. Fitzgerald, and George W.F. McMechen that “there has never been a case of discrimination or oppression brought to the attention of these men which they have not attacked with or without a fee. As a result, they have no equal as a class in sober self-respect, quiet confidence, and a sense of duty.” McCard and the others had built a reputation in the Black community for their activism, civil rights advocacy, and successful litigation overturning the city’s attempt to enact racial zoning through municipal ordinances.
In 1911, when the Baltimore City Council adopted the first residential segregation law in the country, banning Black people from purchasing homes in predominantly white neighborhoods, it was McCard and his colleagues who filed an amicus brief in the landmark 1917 U.S. Supreme Court case Buchanan v. Warley—the Court, which ruled the ordinances unconstitutional. The decision overturned similar residential segregation laws that had been established in other cities.
He was a law partner of a firm that purchased a building on 14 Pleasant Street in Baltimore, which they named the Banneker Law Building in honor of Benjamin Banneker. This is believed to be the first instance in the United States of Black lawyers owning and occupying their own office building.
Grace K. (Wilkins) McCard of Minneapolis, Minnesota, was married to William C. McCard in 1903. Born in 1877, Grace McCard was a civil leader in her own right for fifty years. She passed away in 1957 at the age of 79.
In addition to his pursuit of justice for the African American community in Baltimore, McCard was for 25 years a trustee of the Metropolitan Methodist Episcopal Church. He was a 33rd degree Mason, member of the Knights of Pythias, secretary of the Suffrage League, president of Big Brothers and the William C. McCard Christmas Club, providing Christmas dinners to several homes for the aged and candy and toys to orphans, the Home for Little Boys, the Maryland Training School for Girls, and the Maryland School for the Blind.
McCard was the longest-serving Grand Sire Archon of Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, Inc. in the fraternity’s history. William C. McCard passed away at his home in 1928 at the age of 57.
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