Styles Linton Hutchins (November 1, 1852 – September 7, 1950) was an attorney, politician, and activist in South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee between 1877 (the end of Reconstruction) and 1906 (the height of Jim Crow).

[5][4] For two years in the early 1880s he formed a partnership with Alonzo Herndon, a fellow barber who would later become an insurance executive and Atlanta's first Black millionaire.

[8][9] According to legal testimony he gave in 1876, Hutchins spent his late teens and early twenties traveling through the Southern United States, visiting Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, and South Carolina.

[12][2] During 1877 and 1878, Hutchins lived and practiced law in Columbia and Newberry, South Carolina and Atlanta before settling in Darien, Georgia, where he remained until the end of 1881.

The Hutchins family left Tennessee for the Midwest in late 1906 or early 1907,[25] and by 1910 they were settled in Peoria, Illinois.

[29] Styles Hutchins died at Memorial Hospital in Mattoon, Illinois on September 7, 1950, aged 97, survived by his wife Mattie and his children.

[32]: 7  During his time in office, he managed to convince the assembly to overturn a section of the Chattanooga charter that limited voting rights in city elections to those who paid poll taxes.

[34]: 280, 283 In 1909, Hutchins and Noah W. Parden filed a habeas corpus petition at the United States Supreme Court on behalf of Ed Johnson, who had been convicted of rape and sentenced to death.

The night the court issued the order, a lynch mob, abetted by Chattanooga Sheriff John Shipp,[35] murdered Johnson.

Their actions in defense of Johnson led to Hutchins and Parden being targeted and their law practice being set on fire; both attorneys had to flee town for Oklahoma.