Aaron Alpeoria Bradley (c. 1815–1881) was a lawyer and civil rights activist in the United States. He was born into slavery on a Plantation in South Carolina around 1815 and was of mixed ethnicity. He escaped slavery, went North, and became a lawyer in Massachusetts in 1856. He was the third African American admitted to the Massachusetts Bar. At the end of the Civil War, Bradley moved to Savannah in 1865. He applied for the Georgia Bar but was denied admittance due to his race and controversial political activism against racial injustice.  He became a lawyer in neighboring South Carolina and continued to practice law in Georgia without a license until 1875.

Bradley was elected as a representative to Georgia’s Constitutional Convention of 1867/68 and to the Georgia Assembly as one of 3 Senators. He represented District 1, which covered Chatham, Bryan and Effingham counties.

Bradley was a powerful orator and outspoken civil rights activist. He believed in the freedom of the Black race and championed all black causes. He is accredited as an early proponent of what would become the Black Power Movement, often calling for liberation and escalation of Black Americans in his speeches. He was also an anti-capitalist and held beliefs that predated the Populist Movement decades later.  Bradley also pushed on shared social issues like the Homestead Acts, labor reform, end to debtors’ prison, which banded poor whites with many Black Georgians and fueled hatred among many white Georgians.

Bradley is buried at Greenwood Cemetery in St. Louis Missouri.