Aaron Albert Mossell II (November 3, 1863 – February 1, 1951) was an African-American lawyer who became the first African-American to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Biography
thumb|Mossell's parents, Aaron Albert Mossell I and Eliza Bowers with their surviving five children, c. 1870–1875. From left to right are: Mary Mossell; Alvarilla Mossell; Charles Mossell; Aaron Albert Mossell II; and [[Nathan Francis Mossell (1856–1946).]]
Aaron Albert Mossell II was born in Hamilton, Canada West, in 1863, the youngest of nine children. His parents had moved with their first two children from Maryland to Hamilton in the 1850s to escape the racial discrimination in the United States.
His father, Aaron Albert Mossell I (born 1824), the grandson of slaves, became a brickmaker and in Hamilton went to school to learn to read and write. His mother Eliza Bowers was a free woman from Baltimore whose family had been deported to Trinidad when she was a child. She returned later and met Mossell. By 1865, the family had returned to the United States and lived in Lockport, New York.
Aaron Mossell II graduated from Lincoln University. He earned his law degree at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1888 as the first African American to graduate.
Mossell practiced law with two African-American partners in offices in the Witherspoon Building. He was solicitor of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital, where his brother Nathan Francis Mossell was medical director. He was said to have defended some African-American men after the racial riots of 1917–1919 in Philadelphia. became a practicing lawyer, Assistant City Solicitor and activist on civil rights issues
Mossell separated from his wife and family when Sadie was about a year old, and the couple eventually divorced. Later, he moved to Cardiff, Wales, where he was living by the 1930s and remained the rest of his life, dying there on February 1, 1951, aged 87.