Earley Emmett Caple

Born 1893 in Portsmouth, Virginia, the son of a minister and a machinist, Earley Emmett Caple lived in Virginia, Boston, and Stratford and New Haven, Connecticut prior to enrolling at Yale. He attended Webster Street and Cedar Street Schools and graduated from New Haven High School (now Hillhouse High School) in 1912. Caple received a Yale New Haven Scholarship and attended Yale College from 1912 to 1917 and from 1919 to 1920. In the intervening year, from 1918 to 1919, he attended the Yale School of Music. He roomed at home, was an honors student, and was president of the Zeta Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity.

Earley worked at the Remington Arms plant in Bridgeport and the Bayliss shipyard until 1920, when he entered Yale Law School. He received his JD from Yale in 1924, was admitted to the Connecticut bar, and opened an office in New Haven. According to a 1930 history of New Haven by Mary Mitchell Hewitt, Earley was one of only two Black attorneys in New Haven at the time.

Active in local Republican politics, Earley was elected justice of the peace in the 1920s. In 1924, he married Romietta Hatcher, previously married to Theodore William Hatcher. Caple died in 1944.