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Tim Fulton 00:00
Tim, welcome to the confluence cast presented by Columbus underground. We are a weekly Columbus centric podcast focusing on the civics lifestyle entertainment and people of our city. I’m your host. Tim Fulton this week, Daisy Perkins was Ohio’s first black woman lawyer, a trailblazer who defied expectations and carved out a career in criminal defense at a time when both her race and gender made it nearly impossible. But her story is not one of simple triumph. It’s one of controversy, resilience and ultimately, downfall. In this week’s episode, I sat down with Jesse Beth, a freelance features writer at Columbus underground and author of Daisy’s way, the wild and tragic career of Ohio’s first black woman lawyer. It’s a four part series that unpacks Perkins complex legacy. We explore her rise to prominence, her high profile legal battles and the perjury conviction that ended her career, from courtroom drama and political ambition to police misconduct and systemic bias, we discuss the forces that shaped Perkins’s fate and what her story reveals about justice then and now, whether you see her as a legal Maverick, a victim of discrimination or a cautionary tale, Daisy Perkins story is one that demands to be told you get more information on what we discussed today in the show notes for This episode at the confluence cast.com enjoy the interview, sitting down here with Jesse Beth, a freelance features reporter for Columbus underground. Jesse, how are you? I’m great. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s good to have you back. Long time or medium term listeners of the podcast will recall we talked to you a couple of times about the story about the North Market graveyard. First of all, any updates on that?
Jesse Bethea 02:04
None that I can share. Okay, fair, fair, we’re
Tim Fulton 02:08
talking today on the occasion of a four part series that’s currently trickling out on Columbus underground about Pat Well, Daisy Perkins, who is Daisy Perkins.
Jesse Bethea 02:22
So DAISY Perkins was the first black female attorney in the state of Ohio, okay, and she practiced law in the 1920s here in Columbus, and she was a lawyer, a criminal defense attorney, for about a decade until she was essentially, I would say, railroaded out of her legal career by the local legal establishment. Okay, sent to prison.
Tim Fulton 02:51
Okay. How did you first of all, how did you come across this story? So
Jesse Bethea 02:55
this started a few years ago for my day job. I work for the Ohio channel, and we were, at that time, looking for uh, historical Ohioans, or that we could do short videos about for Black History Month, okay, specifically, black Ohioans who were involved in important legal decisions or important moments in the in the state’s judicial history, okay? And so not civics in general. Literally, no, no, very specifically, you know, had to do with the law. And so it was, it was pointed out to us that, you know, this was the first black female attorney. I didn’t know anything about her, you know, her sort of ignominious end. But in researching it, and I have to give credit to the librarians at the Supreme Court of Ohio law library, they dug up a lot of material for me to make this video, and so I did a lot of research. Found a lot of interesting information that I hadn’t seen
Tim Fulton 04:00
reported elsewhere. Did you end up doing the video I
Jesse Bethea 04:03
did, but it was ultimately I felt too short. You know, just the format wasn’t I didn’t have as much space as I wanted to to talk about all the details of what happened. Okay, so I started basically three ish years ago, writing this series, okay? And just sort of trying to get it like, How can I? Because it’s, it’s actually a bit of a complicated narrative to explain, and so I was trying to condense it and get it concise, okay, but also have all the facts and as I understand them, to bring this story to light, because there’s really
Tim Fulton 04:38
so it’s fair to say, basically, you did a smaller version of this project, yes, and then you wanted to, you brought it to Walker and Columbus underground, and were like, I want to do this, right? It’s not a secret that you are doing it on the occasion of Black History Month, either.
Jesse Bethea 04:53
No. I mean, I would have done it anyway, right? But I sort of, I got to a point where I was like, this feels ready to go. And it. Happens to be, you know, Black History Month. So I said, Well, this, this makes a lot of sense to put it out.
Tim Fulton 05:06
Let’s do a little bit on sort of how you talked about the Supreme Court library talk about the research and the work that you did to sort of put this together well. So
Jesse Bethea 05:15
I focused a lot of my attention on similar to what I did with the graveyard series on going through the archives of the Columbus Dispatch and to a lesser extent, the Ohio State News, even though that was not really an operation in the 1920s but other newspapers were okay, and so all of their archives, the dispatch archives, are all you know in Columbus library, and the Columbus library also has, on their third floor, in their genealogy section, they have this very interesting section where it’s, it’s literally just big cabinets full of manila folders with different topics,
Tim Fulton 05:54
okay, like things that clippings that have been tagged, yeah, as this. This is this article is around this topic. Okay?
Jesse Bethea 06:01
So as I was in the process of doing that, I was like, Well, I wonder if they have anything about DAISY Perkins. And one of those manila folders is labeled Daisy Perkins, okay, have a bunch of clipped articles that I had never seen before, not even in their online archives. Okay? And so I was able to get that information. And the I would say, the more vital thing that I received was from the librarians at the Supreme Court. They gave me the the full appeal that Daisy Perkins filed with the state Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court.
Tim Fulton 06:32
And so let’s jump to what happened, right? Like, what happened so she practiced, you said, I think for 10 years about,
Jesse Bethea 06:38
yeah, between 1920 and I think, yeah, I think she was admitted to the bar in 1919 and she was disbarred in 1928
Tim Fulton 06:47
Okay, and she, there was one specific case. She was, what’s the gentleman’s name? She was de Leon Knight. Leon Knight murdered his mother in law, yes. And she got him off for it. She,
Jesse Bethea 07:00
she got him. She didn’t get him off. He did go to the the Ohio State Penitentiary. He was addicted. He definitely did it. Okay, let me be clear about that, yeah, what she managed to do was convince the jury that he might have acted in self defense. Okay? Because of that, he was because of that, the jury recommended mercy. The jury recommended that he not be executed. Okay, so that was what she she didn’t save him from going to jail, but she or to prison, right? She saved him from going to the electric chair,
Tim Fulton 07:34
okay? And then turned and then some folks probably were not happy with that, specifically
Jesse Bethea 07:40
the county prosecutor at that time, and so
Tim Fulton 07:43
the county prosecutor ended up charging her with soliciting perjury. Yes, who was the star witness she had? So
Jesse Bethea 07:49
the witness was a man named Abraham small. This was also a black man who lived on the east side, and he was friends with Leon Knight. Okay, small testified that before the shooting, Leon Knight’s brother and brothers in law came to him and asked to borrow a gun and for the specific purpose of killing Leon Knight, so that insured that that introduced the idea that, Oh, this was
Tim Fulton 08:17
this Leon Knight had found out about this. It is possible to believe that he believed that he was there was a risk to his life, right? Or
Jesse Bethea 08:25
even if there was another gun there besides Leon knights, that means there might have been a shootout and there was collateral damage, and he’s still responsible, but he did not go there with the intent of murdering his mother in law.
Tim Fulton 08:36
Okay? Did he have, sorry? Did he have a motive for murdering his mother in law. It
Jesse Bethea 08:41
seems that his, his he did not get along with his wife’s family very much. Okay, his his wife’s name was Roxy Knight, and then his mother in law was named Mary Hill. And then she had a number of sons as well, and they were all in this one apartment on the side. And some there was some sort of altercation between Leon, his brother, brothers in law, and then his mother in law was also there at the same time, and
Tim Fulton 09:08
she was killed. And she was killed, okay? And so the Franklin County prosecutor at the time, then the case ends, he gets mercy. And then what is the process that they sort of went through to get get against her, like, what? So the
Jesse Bethea 09:30
the prosecutor, basically, the crux of the prosecutors argument, is that when Abraham small testified at the grand jury. Okay, he didn’t say anything about these brothers asking to borrow a gun. Okay, so, and that testimony appeared only after the fact at the and for those
Tim Fulton 09:49
that aren’t aware, the grand jury is basically what you go to before you bring charges in order to basically get quote, unquote permission to bring charges, right? But the
Jesse Bethea 09:58
interesting thing is that the brothers. Members of the the sons of the woman who was murdered. Okay? They told the grand jury they did go and asked to borrow a gun from Abraham small. So, oh, so the prosecutor then contends, okay, so Daisy Perkins got this testimony from the hill brothers. They gave to the grand jury, and then she went and showed it to Abraham small so that he could say the same thing on the stand later, which would be, you know, would be illegal, soliciting perjury, exactly right. But the only evidence that he had that she did that is Abraham small right is claiming that. But he was prosecuting Abraham small for perjury. Sorry,
Tim Fulton 10:40
just repeating it back. Sure. The brothers said to the grand jury, we went and got a gun against this guy because we really didn’t like him. Yeah, we went and got it from this guy, Mr. Small, small, small. And then the prosecutor is basically saying, Well, Mr. Small never told us about this. Hence, that is perjury. Yes, that’s, I mean, it’s not perjury. It’s just a new it’s just a fact, though. And
Jesse Bethea 11:06
this is also coming at the same time as the prosecution, even when the night trial is underway, the prosecution is trying to prevent small from testifying, even to the point that after he does testify, they have detectives uh, basically follow him out of the courthouse and assault him and then arrest him for perjury. And the only evidence, the only reason they think that he has committed perjury is because he said something different at the trial than he said at the Grand Jury hearing,
Tim Fulton 11:34
even though that information was already stated in the grand jury
Jesse Bethea 11:37
exactly, and witnesses change their testimony all the time. It doesn’t necessarily mean, right, that they’ve been bribed or,
Tim Fulton 11:44
you know, and so the prosecutor then, because they have not, apparently, one pound of flesh is not enough. They then want to go after the attorney, the defense attorney as well. Exactly what’s the argument that they make, that she solicited perjury? Well,
Jesse Bethea 11:59
they so they get testimony from small, who, again, they are in the process of prosecuting. So this is, this is a, you know, a carrot and a stick situation. Small, if you tell me that Daisy Perkins bribed you to change your testimony, we’ll go light on you exactly. And they did. He was never, he was never convicted of perjury? Okay? She was convicted of asking him to perjure himself. Ray was never convicted of perjury. And
Tim Fulton 12:26
so she tries to defend herself. She says, This is ridiculous. She says, Here’s, you know, here’s where this information came from.
Jesse Bethea 12:33
And as far as I can tell, and again, there’s a limited historical record here.
Tim Fulton 12:38
I assume you don’t have direct transcripts of the case. I
Jesse Bethea 12:42
have transcripts of the night trial, but not her, not her testimony, not her own trial. Gotta say, because I so I don’t know what sort of physical evidence, but based on the briefs filed by John Chester, the prosecutor at that time, he never says, like, oh, and we have this document that proves that she did this. We have all they seem to have, is the testimony, yeah, of a person they were trying anyway, so
Tim Fulton 13:07
end of the day. So I think we all sort of know where this is going. She gets prosecuted. Yes, she does get convicted. Yes, the it’s not super important to the story, but she actually doesn’t turn herself in. She goes on the run. There’s, is there an interesting part of that, or is it just she went on the run,
Jesse Bethea 13:28
and she was on the run for about a month? Okay? And it’s kind of funny, because in the in in the newspaper archives, there are, every now and then there’s an article that’ll pop up that’s like, Daisy Perkins resurfaces in Cleveland and files like a legal brief or something to Oh, so she was doing it. She was still sending off. She was still sending petitions of appeal, huh? Like as she was traveling around the state not being arrested, interesting. And so finally, she’s located at her sister’s house in North Baltimore, okay? And they arrest her there and bring her back to Columbus, and she is sentenced to go to Marysville, okay, women’s reformatory there,
Tim Fulton 14:06
and sort of lit, and I imagine disbarred. She’s disbarred at that time, yes. And I, as you sort of talk through in the piece, sort of lives an un miraculous life after that.
Jesse Bethea 14:18
Yeah, after so she goes to prison. She is offered parole a few years in and actually refuses it. I don’t have there’s not an explicit reason why she refuses. I suspect it’s because you have to admit wrongdoing and she you have to supplicate yourself too. Yeah, she was adamant that she did nothing wrong. Okay, so she serves the rest of her term until she’s finally paroled again in 1937 She does seem to take that parole, and she lives the rest of her life in Columbus and in his she never practices law, but she seems to have been a very active member of St Paul AME Church. Mm, hmm. On the east side. A lot of their bulletins that have shown up in in my research feature her as, like, on a bunch of different committees and whatnot, through the 1940s and then she she died in 1963
Tim Fulton 15:12
Okay? And is the motivation for her prosecution? Is it entirely surrounding this one case, or is it this person’s a thorn in our side this per there’s racism, sexism as part of it.
Jesse Bethea 15:29
I mean, I don’t think you can, I Yeah. I mean, I don’t think you can discount that there must have been some racial and misogynistic motivation. Yeah, having said that, you know, I also just don’t discount that lawyers often make a lot of mistakes, and sometimes repeatedly, and they can. So I do try to leave space in the article and in my own mind that she definitely could have made a made mistakes. She might very well. He’s even, you know, everything I just described about soliciting perjury or bribing witnesses. It’s very possible she did all that, okay, but the the fact is, her prosecution was, you know, would not hold water in modern times. Okay? For one thing, she was a political opponent of the prosecutor himself. She ran against him for county prosecutor. Oh, okay, the year before she was tried, okay? So there were all kinds of reasons why he had a conflict of interest. I mean, he had just, he had just tried the night trial, just they had just been opponents in and
Tim Fulton 16:34
he was pissed off that he didn’t get what he wanted, right? So I don’t think
Jesse Bethea 16:37
there’s any way that in in a modern situation, he would have been allowed to personally conduct this prosecution against her. I think they, you know, we would understand now that a special prosecutor or somebody would have been appointed by the court to see it through if there was legitimate evidence well, and
Tim Fulton 16:54
even if these conflicts didn’t exist. This is not the kind of case that you try, yeah, like you just there. The argument being that lawyers are going to make a good faith effort to get within the bounds of the law and within the bounds of the court process, but they’re going to make their best, best faith effort to get their client the best deal they can. Sure that’s what she was trying to do. She may have made a mistake, and that’s the space we’re sort of leaving for that. But even if that mistake had happened, is it should be acknowledged, she would not have been prosecuted in this way. I
Jesse Bethea 17:32
mean, I’m it’s always bad to make these grand generalizations. Okay, can you imagine a white male attorney in the 1920s doing something shady like that, if, if she really did it, and going to jail for 10 years, I
Tim Fulton 17:46
can’t imagine a black female attorney these days having that happen to them, right? Yeah, so a product of the time, I think, is sort of what we’re, if not directly saying, at least inferring talk about, sort of her, just general, like, what was her life before that? What, I mean, she
Jesse Bethea 18:07
seems to have been a very driven woman. I mean, obviously, yeah, but she was sort of an attorney. She’s trying to be a politician, yeah, yeah. I mean, she ran for office, you know, every conceivable local office in Columbus throughout the 1920s she ran for school board, I believe, she ran for city council, she ran for county prosecutor, more than once, under party affiliation and as an independent, she seems to have the one thing I note in the article Is that she, there are a couple of instances where she seems to annoy the even the black male legal establishment, okay, but they have a habit of coming to her defense eventually. Like she, she is sort of she,
Tim Fulton 18:54
she ruffles some feathers. It doesn’t matter whose feathers they are. Yes, got it
Jesse Bethea 18:59
so overwhelmingly they’re men’s feathers. But because they’re there, there are black attorneys, or black male attorneys, who don’t seem to like what she’s doing, but one of them ends up defending her, you know, as she’s appealing this conviction, so clearly, I think there was an understanding that, like she might be difficult, yeah,
Tim Fulton 19:22
for us to work isn’t right. Yeah, exactly, yeah. What else should we know about DAISY Perkins?
Jesse Bethea 19:32
I mean, that’s a good question, because there’s a lot of things I want to know about DAISY Perkins still, I think to be
Tim Fulton 19:40
clear, most of the records that you have are one, whether she ran for these things, yeah, the church bulletins and then the court records, yes. So the sort of like, how do we navigate historically again, a little under 100 years ago? Like, what was this person like and how? How did they live their life? Yeah,
Jesse Bethea 20:04
why? I personally want to know more about her life after prison and her what she devoted herself to. It seems that she devoted a lot of her time to church, work, she she never married, never had children. She seems to have had a lot of friends and relatives, but I do wonder what because she she lived a long life. She outlived her rival, John Chester, okay, and she was also older than him to begin with, so that, you know, she saw the world change around her in a lot of interesting ways. And I do wish I knew more about how she felt about all that, because I’m sure, I’m sure, I guess I imagined right, she was wronged. Yeah. I mean, she was frankly wronged. And I imagine there were times when she must have seen changes in the city, changes in the country and thought, you know it, it’s really frustrating that I was left behind because of this, because of this, frankly, injustice, yeah,
Tim Fulton 21:11
and yet, based on the documents surrounding her life, she rose up right, and unfortunately, was then torn down.
Jesse Bethea 21:21
Yes, yeah, I think that that too is, I mean, the the articles before her trial, it does seem that she became a bit of a local celebrity at times, but maybe not in, like, a generous way. I imagine that the newspapers sort of treated her as a novelty, yeah? And we have them today, right? Yeah, right. And so it was, this
Tim Fulton 21:46
person is always speaking up. This person is always like, getting just enough signatures to get on the ballot that too. But I think
Jesse Bethea 21:53
it was also a bit of like, look at this black woman practicing law, you know, isn’t that fun? Isn’t that interesting? And so there were a number, I think that that was the news hook. I think, okay, because I can’t I, I mean, media was very different back then. They covered all kinds of things that we wouldn’t really think of as news now, but yes, it’s hard for me to imagine that, you know, they were covering the exploits of every attorney in the city. Yeah, I think it was. There was a bit of a novelty of like, bit of
Tim Fulton 22:21
a but the end of the day, they want readers, right? Yeah, just there
Jesse Bethea 22:25
was right. I got the sense from reading them that there was some entertainment value to covering her career and that too. I mean, maybe it wasn’t her preferred way of getting notoriety. I doubt that it was, but it did give her notoriety, and that too, I imagine, turned a lot of people against her. Yeah.
Tim Fulton 22:45
So basically, what you’re saying is all press is good press, it’s getting her notoriety to the point that you know, she’s probably getting hired more. Sure? Well, that’s her billing rate, yes.
Jesse Bethea 22:57
And, and there is a they note all of these articles note when, when she’s defending a black person, okay? And that’s the majority of the time, okay. So I imagine that it was understood by the black population of Columbus at that time, like we need lawyers who look like us, who are going to defend us. But at the same time that wasn’t
Tim Fulton 23:21
exclusive, though. I mean, no, every black person on trial was defended by Right,
Jesse Bethea 23:27
no, but she was also defending, she appears to be defending a lot of women, especially in situations where they need divorces and the other She, at least at one point, was defending an Eastern European immigrant in a way, for some sort of prohibition trial. Okay, and that too is noted by the dispatch in their, in their articles, of like, they sort of, they quote him, the defendant. But they, but they make a point of using, like, the accent, you know, to say, like, oh, this person is
Tim Fulton 24:02
they wrote the quote phonetically, Oh, yes. Oh, good, yeah. That’s not racist, right? Yeah. Oh, you didn’t know what he was saying because, but you can spell it out so you
Jesse Bethea 24:12
think, yeah. So you can see a little bit of like, the media at that time may have treated it as, like, there’s entertainment value. Like, wow, black lady is defending a funny European man, yeah,
Tim Fulton 24:23
yeah. But at the end of the day, I think when you parse together the individual things that she did, she had, she was guided by the goal of doing good, sure, right, yeah, even if, frankly, this, I mean, this guy murdered his mother in law. That’s not absolutely okay, but if it’s to get the guy off death row and like, but we don’t know what her even like opinion about death row is, right? We don’t know if that’s the motive. No, I mean, and she defended him throughout the case. Yes, when there. Just sentencing? No, it was just, it
Jesse Bethea 25:01
was, it was throughout the case. But you know, defense attorneys don’t have to have motives. Their only motives are to do what’s best for their clients. And I think that’s what she wanted. I think she recognized, I’m not going to prove this guy didn’t kill his mother in law, because he definitely did, but what I can do is keep him from going to the electric chair. And based on the evidence that I’m aware of, exactly right, she managed to do that. Did the the press surrounding this guy not going to death row warrant? Was it a big splash? Like Franklin County prosecutor fails case? No, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t say that. I mean, it’s personal this, yeah, and I mean, if I’m, if I’m doing a little bit of pop psychology on people who’ve been dead 100 years, right? John, John J Chester, I mean, that that was a prominent family and still is in Columbus, the his son went on to be a rather famous attorney representing somebody involved in Watergate. I think it was okay in his father, the prosecutor, John Chester’s John Chester, the first was also a prominent attorney, and all the way back, you know, into the 1800s so I think that this, this person who was very young, John Chester, the second, okay? I think he had a lot of pressure to to sort of live up to a family reputation. And he ended up later he did. He was involved in a very prominent prosecution of the, I forget his first name, but the snook case, the Okay, the famous OSU professor who murdered his mistress. Yeah, he was the prosecutor on that as well, and that sort of made, made his name. But then later in the in the 30s, he ended up getting tangled up in some some corruption scandals after he was no longer the county prosecutor, his replacement actually did a wide ranging investigation of public corruption, and both him and his detective, who was involved in slapping Abraham small around, they both got tied into this sort of they were collecting money from gambling dens and giving it to The County Republican Party, and they weren’t supposed to be doing that. No, imagine. And then a few years after that, they both, for some reason, got into a giant drunken fight on High Street, and 100 people watched it, and it was such a it was a big enough fight and so violent that it ended up in the dispatch. Okay, so things got a little rocky for him after the after this situation, but I do think I can imagine that, like there was some reputational protection going on of like, even though he won this case, I think they’re just having been bested a little bit,
Tim Fulton 28:03
yeah, led him by not getting the the death sentence that he wanted at the end of the day. What do you hope people sort of take away from the story of Daisy Perkins?
Jesse Bethea 28:16
I I mean, I believe at one point there was discussion of of a pardon. I haven’t really been able to find a lot of details on that, and I’m not advocating that. You know, I wouldn’t advocate that she be pardoned, but I do. I would like people to take another look at this and to recognize this as sort of something that happened that probably shouldn’t have happened. Yeah, that
Tim Fulton 28:49
is and so at the end, let me translate it, sure. At the end of the day, this is the first black woman who’s an attorney in the entire state of Ohio, right? And look what you did to her,
Jesse Bethea 28:58
exactly. And I think it the simplest question is to be like, Okay, well, we know the first of all kinds of stuff. You know. We know the first person to walk on the moon. We know the first black man on the Supreme Court. Yep, we know the first woman on the on the Supreme Court, or on the Ohio Supreme Court.
Tim Fulton 29:17
And the first black woman in the state of Ohio, who served, who was an attorney, has an asterisk next to her name, yeah, yeah. And
Jesse Bethea 29:24
there and in the in the article, I think I said, you know, if it had ended any other way, we would have named a library after her or something, yeah. I mean, Columbus loves to celebrate its heroes like that, yeah. But we can’t celebrate this hero because of this thing. But the thing, but look pretty shady, yeah?
Tim Fulton 29:45
So maybe not a pardon, but a library,
Jesse Bethea 29:47
but a library. I mean, what? I don’t, I don’t think I don’t need her to receive anything except for a little bit more attention, yeah,
Tim Fulton 29:56
well, and also maybe a bit more of a. Acknowledgement that the Columbus way, and I’m using a capital W there, that the Columbus way is hers and is not always as clean. It’s not always Jerry mock. It’s not always like, look at this female pilot that did this great thing. I’m not discrediting Jerry mock at all. However that, like people come to pioneering places, and sometimes it doesn’t always work out. And frankly, sometimes those things not working out aren’t their fucking fault. Yeah, so
Jesse Bethea 30:47
Jesse, thanks for your time. I hope, as always, I was coherent. Absolutely you were you were thank you again. Thank you.
Tim Fulton 31:02 You you for listening to the confluence cast presented by Columbus underground. Again. You get more information on what we discussed today in the show notes for this episode at the confluence cast.com Please rate, subscribe, share this episode of The confluence cast with your friends, family, contacts, enemies, your favorite historian. If you’re interested in sponsoring the confluence cast, get in touch with us. We can be reached by email at info, at the confluence cast.com, our theme music was composed by Benji Robinson. Our producer is Philip Cogley. I’m your host. Tim Fulton, Have a great week.
