Emma Hamilton Dancing

Roger Demosthenes O’Kelly was born in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1880 and also spent some of his early life in South Carolina. When he was nine years old, he became deaf as a result of scarlet fever. Later, his vision was impaired due to a football injury. He communicated primarily through sign language and through writing. He graduated from the North Carolina State School for the Deaf and Blind, then completed a bachelor of laws degree from Shaw University in 1909. After working briefly on a tunnel drilling project in New York City, he entered the Yale Law School. He was only the second deaf student to attend Yale. He later described the way he navigated lecture-based law classes:

Some of my classmates had been newspaper reporters and they took down the lecture verbatim, transcribed them, and loaned me their copies. I recopied them and have them today. So I had no trouble in keeping up. The examinations were conducted by writing as are those given by our state Supreme Court.

While a student at Yale, he worked through the Yale student employment bureau. He graduated from Yale in 1912 and briefly worked on another tunnel-drilling project in Montreal, Canada, before returning to North Carolina.

There, he briefly worked as a teacher and opened his legal practice. He married Goldie Euzelia Weaver in 1920. He was a founding member of the Negro State Bar Association of North Carolina in 1922. He had a long and successful career as an attorney, particularly serving the Black community of Raleigh. O’Kelly died in 1962.