Lovelace's father was a prominent White man and his mother, Penelope Capehart was enslaved.
Arthur Caldwell’s History of the American Negro and his Institutions reported that after the Civil War, no one advised Lovelace about receiving an education.

Nevertheless, he earned law and medical degrees from Shaw University which helped him nourish Raleigh's African American community as a physician and Shaw University professor. The N&O reported his wife Maggie became an activist in 1939, when she and neighbors sued to stop the city from expropriating her next home on Smith Street.

Dr. Lovelace and his wife Maggie built their first home in Raleigh, NC, on land sold to them from her brother, Dr. Love.

"That land was part of “House Creek district” in 1871, where Wake County’s fourth-highest population of African Americans lived according to a map by Fendol Bevers.
The statistic eventually included Dr. Thomas Love, who purchased the lot in 1888. Part of the first generation in his family who learned to read according to the 1900 Census, Love and his brother opened Love’s Drug Store by 1910.
They dispensed medical advice, along with tickets to local events the city forbade African Americans from buying elsewhere, according to N&O. In 1903, Love sold the land to his sister, Maggie, and her husband, physician Dr. Lovelace Capehart."

Source for information in quotations: Brick Layers: An Atlas of New Perspectives on NC State’s Campus History / Dan Allen Drive and Dan Allen Parking Deck
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From: History of the American Negro and his institutions; Vol. 4- North Carolina Edition. Published 1917
by Arthur Bunyan Caldwell

Page 647 -648

Lovelace Brown Capehart

Dr. Lovelace Brown Capehart, A. B.. A. M., LL.B.. M. D., is a man of marked ability and real worth. He was born in Bertie Co, N. C, Sept. 28, 1863. His father was one of the most substantial white citizens of that section,
and his mother's name was Penelope Capehart.

His ancestors on his father's side were French settlers in Louisiana :and the ancestors of his mother's side were slaves.

Dr. Capehart was reared in the midst of adverse circumstances and had much to overcome to get a start in life. He had no one to help him but his mother and no one to advise him how to secure an education. But in some way or other he managed to get a start sufficient to permit him to enter the State Normal School at Elizabeth City.

From the beginning he showed himself possessed of a high order of intellect, and his progress was rapid in his studies. He afterward entered Shaw University about 1884, and remained there through much effort until he was finally graduated not only from the College Department, but until he had also finished the course in the Law Department at the same institution.

He then accepted a position as an instructor in his Alma Mater, becoming professor of English, which position he held successfully for eight years, after which he resigned to accept a similar position in the Jackson Baptist College, at Jackson, Miss.

He remained in the far South for several years and gathered valuable experience which greatly helped him in his after life. He then resigned and return to Raleigh where he took up the study of medicine at Leonard Medical College, and began the practice •of medicine in Raleigh in 1907 and has continued there since.

Dr. Capehart was married to Miss Maggie Lillian Love at Raleigh on March 3, 1893, and to this happy union have been born six children, five of whom survive. The oldest son, Henry Martin Tupper Capehart, died in infancy. The second son, Lieut. Lovelace B. Capehart, Jr., served in the Army in France. He is now married and engaged in Y. M. C. A. work.

The third child is a daughter, Miss Myrtle Lillian, an accomplished young lady of engaging personality and pleasing manners. The fourth child, Edwin L. Capehart, served in the Navy during the World war.

Dr. Capehart's idea of the best solution of the problems of the race is that the Negro should receive the full protection of the law as every other citizen, and be allowed to work out his own destiny.

He has full confidence in the ability of his race to make good if given the proper chance:
One thing is certain, and that is if the race had only a few "thousand men of the character and worth of Dr. Capehart we should soon have no race problem on our hands.

He claims that he owes his success in life to his having been reared at his mother's fireside out in the country away from the allurements of city life as well as his being influenced by the lives of distinguished persons that he early learned to emulate, and most of all to the study and acquaintance with the Bible. He is a member of the Baptist church.

In politics he is a Republican, but has never held nor sought any political office. He is a member of the Pythians and other organizations and is always regarded as a safe and worthy leader.
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Dr. Capehart is mentioned in this history about Dr. Pope.

From: Dr. M.T. Pope House Statewide Significance Report / Dr. MT Pope House, 511 S. Wilmington Street, facade.
Raleigh Historic Development Commission

After the war, in 1899, Pope moved to Raleigh and established a medical practice there; in 1900, he began building the house at 511 South Wilmington Street.

That same year, the “suffrage” amendment to the state constitution passed, which effectively disenfranchised most African American voters in North Carolina. Pope’s political activity in his Raleigh years reacted to this loss of civil rights. Pope registered to vote in Raleigh in October 1902, apparently in response to a registration call issued several weeks earlier by the just-formed Colored Voters League of North Carolina.

Only six other African American men successfully registered to vote in Raleigh at that time. The thirty-one registered African American voters in Wake County totaled less than half a percent of the county’s registered voters.

The African American community's loss of political traction and the rise of segregation that marked the early years of the twentieth century caused many African Americans to turn away from politics and toward developing businesses to serve their own community in this period, and Pope similarly focused on his medical practice and his community in the ensuing years.4 In 1919, the fight for voting rights and political power for African Americans went public again in Raleigh.

That year, the locally established Twentieth Century Voter’s Club nominated an all-black slate for Raleigh’s municipal election, with prominent Raleigh businessmen in each of the three slots.

Dr. Pope headed the slate as the mayoral candidate, Dr. Lovelace. B. Capehart ran for commissioner of public safety, and Calvin E. Lightner ran for commissioner of public works. Capehart eventually withdrew and Lawrence Cheek, editor of the African American-owned Raleigh Independent newspaper, replaced him.

The slate was entirely symbolic—there was no hope of winning the election—but the Twentieth Century Voter’s Club meant it as an “expression of the feeling of the Negroes in the city that they ought to have greater rights than afforded them,” as Zogry’s dissertation quoted J.H. Love, local pharmacy owner and the group’s president. Zogry notes that the 1919 election added African American voters to the polls and “shook up” white leaders around the state sufficiently to initiate improvements to public education for African Americans.

Calvin Lightner’s son, Clarence E. Lightner, recalled that “it showed young Black people that they could run for office, and I think that is where my first interest in running for office came from as I listened to [my father] talk about these things.” The younger Lightner went on to be elected Raleigh’s first Black mayor, in 1973.

4
Zogry, 152-157; Crow, 115-118.
5
Zogry, 206-216; Linda Simmons-Henry and Linda Harris Edmisten, Culture Town: Life in Raleigh’s African
American Communities (Raleigh: Raleigh Historic Districts Commission, 1993), 64-65.