Legal Profession

By: Jacqueline A. McLeod

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Legal Profession

Now visible at almost every level of the legal profession, African American women lawyers in the twenty-first century have finally made significant inroads in their struggle to study and practice the law. Being doubly marginalized by both race and gender prejudices has meant that they have made such inroads in spite of great obstacles. From preparation to practice, the legal profession proved to be rough terrain for African American women. Yet, black women lawyers have distinguished themselves in private practice and government agencies, as law professors and as judges. Their personal and professional lives tell a story of hard work, commitment, and service to the bar, the black community, and the nation as a whole.

Early Pioneers

Black women were among the first women of any race to practice law. In 1796, a black woman named Lucy Terry Prince, although not a lawyer, became the first woman to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court. The first generation of African American women lawyers, however, did not emerge until the late nineteenth century. In 1872, almost three decades after Macon B. Allen became the first African American lawyer, and three years after Arabella Mansfield became the first American woman to practice law, Charlotte E. Ray (1850–1911) became the first black woman lawyer in the United States, and the first woman lawyer in the District of Columbia, when she graduated from Howard University Law School and was admitted to practice law. She remained the nation's only black woman lawyer for eleven years. In 1883 Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823–1893), who began law school at Howard a year before Charlotte Ray, became the nation's second black woman lawyer. Since Cary was admitted to Howard's first law class in 1869, she has the distinction of being one of the first women admitted to an American law school. Eliza Chambers graduated from Howard in 1888 and practiced in Washington, DC, in the general areas of equity, patents, pensions, and land claims. Ida G. Platt, who graduated from the Chicago Law School (now the Chicago-Kent Law School) with high honors in 1892, was admitted to practice law in Illinois in 1894. Lutie Lytle, the last in this generation of black women lawyers, graduated from Central Tennessee Law School in 1897 and was admitted to the Tennessee bar in the same year.

Howard Law School and other black law schools, such as Central Tennessee Law School, trained this first cohort of African American women lawyers. Whereas black men, whether self-taught or tutored by lawyers or judges, first entered the legal profession by reading the law, black women entered the legal profession only after being formally trained in law schools. However, during the nineteenth century most of the nation's law schools excluded blacks, and those that admitted a token number were seldom open to women. For example, Harvard Law School, which admitted its first black student, George Lewis Ruffin, in 1868 and graduated black men such as Raymond Pace Alexander, William Henry Hastie, and Charles Hamilton Houston, routinely denied admission to women, both black and white, until 1950. Pauli Murray, a black woman law graduate of Howard Law School, was told upon application to pursue a graduate law program at Harvard in the early 1940s that she was not of the sex entitled to be admitted to Harvard Law School.

Other white male schools were not quite so intransigent, but they were sufficiently backward to retard the progress of women, and especially black women, for the greater part of the nation's history. Yale Law School lifted its restrictive policy against women in 1918, two years before women finally achieved the right to vote, and in 1928 Jane Matilda Bolin, America's first African American woman judge, became the first black female law student at the law school. Although the University of Michigan was one of the first publicly supported law schools to admit and graduate African Americans, the first black woman to attend the university's law school left after three months. The second, Lucia Theodosia Thomas, who entered in 1936, was told by the admissions officer that she would be better off pursuing a career in medicine since the law school's mission was to train judges and legislators, roles in which he did not foresee a black woman.

Clearly, the establishment of black law schools was critical to the training of the first generation of black women lawyers. Several law schools were established in the late nineteenth century to train black lawyers. They usually adhered to a nondiscriminatory policy of admission, and a few, such as Howard Law School, opened their doors with a racially integrated faculty, a practice unheard of in other American law schools. Howard Law School is the nation's first black law school. It was established in 1869 under the leadership of John Mercer Langston, who was one of the first black lawyers in the nation admitted to practice law but was also the first known African American in the nation denied admission to a law school. From its inception, Howard Law School was committed to training both men and women, irrespective of race, ethnicity, or religion. It had a higher enrollment of women students than most American law schools. Between 1882 and 1904, the law school graduated at least seven white women who were denied admission to white law schools. Between 1896 and 1944, it graduated twenty-eight black women. Central Tennessee Law School was one of ten black law schools established between 1870 and 1896. It was the second black law school in the South when it opened in 1879.

The nineteenth-century African American woman lawyer had few prospects for law-related employment. The government did not hire black lawyers, and black communities were an insufficient source of potential clients. Charlotte E. Ray maintained a small practice in Washington, DC, and became the first black woman lawyer to try a case when she served as attorney for the plaintiff in a divorce case heard before the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia in 1875. But by 1879 she had given up all hope of a successful practice and returned to her hometown of New York to become a teacher in the Brooklyn public schools. Mary Ann Shadd Cary, author of an 1870 corporation law thesis that was commented upon favorably by Howard University's president, General O. O. Howard, practiced for four years in Washington, DC. Cary also utilized her training and years in the abolitionist movement in her advocacy of women's suffrage. In testimony before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee in the late nineteenth century, Cary demanded that as a citizen and taxpayer she have the right to vote and the right to be governed by her own consent the same as men.

Lutie Lytle, who was admitted to the bar of Tennessee and Kansas, intended to begin private practice immediately following her graduation. However, she escaped the disappointment of trying to obtain sufficient legal business when she joined the law faculty at Central Tennessee Law School in 1897, where she taught domestic relations, evidence, and criminal procedure for four years. She was the first black female lawyer in the South and the first female law professor of a chartered law school in the world. Ida Platt was the only one from this first generation of black women lawyers to establish a successful practice. Platt, who probably passed for white, established a partnership with a white lawyer following her admission to the Illinois bar and practiced away from Chicago's African American community. Platt's ability to exploit society's racial code to her professional advantage reveals the distance between the experiences of black and white women in the legal profession.

Lutie Lytle, the first black female lawyer in the South, graduated from Central Tennessee Law School in 1897 and was admitted to the Tennessee bar in the same year.

Kansas State Historical Society

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By 1900 eighteen of the nineteen law schools that had been established to train black lawyers were closed, mainly because of the standards of legal education established by the American Bar Association (ABA). This is one of many situations in which the “professionalization” of a field forced out African Americans and their institutions. Howard survived and, under the leadership of Charles Hamilton Houston, gained full ABA and Association of American Law Schools (AALS) accreditation in 1930 and 1931 respectively. But the possibilities for legal training for black women were greatly diminished. As late as 1910 there were reportedly only two practicing black women lawyers in the nation.

As nineteenth-century legal professionals, Charlotte E. Ray, Mary Shadd Cary, Lutie Lytle, and Ida B. Platt were members of a profession that considered women unsuited for the practice of law. Their chances for truly active practice were therefore severely limited. However, as early pioneers these women set a precedent of what was possible for generations of African American women. Black women had always worked outside the home, but they were disproportionately represented as domestic servants well into the twentieth century. They tended to enter the professions as teachers, either because of a desire to avoid domestic service or because they were motivated by the serious need for teachers in the black community. However, although most of the more than thirty thousand black women professionals in the early twentieth century were teachers, Ray, Cary, Lytle, and Platt represent a small cadre of black women who sidestepped teaching and dared to become lawyers. Understanding what was possible, the next wave of black women lawyers became twentieth-century pioneers who carved out their own niche and constructed their own professional identity as they made inroads in a profession that still considered them outsiders.

Inroads in the Legal Profession, 1920–1960

The passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and women's new political status broadened their opportunities in the legal profession. Having secured the right to practice law in every state by the 1920s, women in general and black women in particular began to make significant inroads in the legal profession. African American women established themselves in noticeable numbers, and several even distinguished themselves in the legal profession in the 1920s and 1930s. The Great Migration had brought many African Americans from the rural South to the urban North, to major cities like Chicago and New York, and provided a black clientele for this second generation of black women lawyers. By 1935, there were black women lawyers in California, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the District of Columbia, with Illinois leading in the number of black women lawyers. Still, the black woman lawyer's experience at the early-twentieth-century bar was defined largely by discrimination and exclusion.

Among the African American women admitted to practice law in Illinois in the 1920s were Violet Neatly Anderson Johnson, who graduated from the Chicago Law School in 1920; Sophia Boaz Pitts, who graduated from Kent College of Law in Chicago in 1923; Edith Spurlock Sampson and Georgia Jones-Ellis, who both graduated from John Marshall Law School in Chicago in 1925; Anna Crisp, who graduated from the Chicago Law School in 1926; and Alice Huggins, who graduated from John Marshall Law School in 1929. By the 1920s, several of the nation's law schools had begun admitting a token number of black women, but Howard University Law School again took the lead in training black women. Among the black women lawyers licensed to practice law in the 1920s, several had graduated from Howard Law School, including Ollie M. Cooper and Isadora A. Letcher, who were both 1921 graduates; Zephyr Moore Ramsey, a 1922 graduate; and L. Marian Poe, a 1925 graduate.

Violette Anderson.  During the 1920s, she was the first African American woman to practice law in Illinois. She was also the first to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court.

General Research and Reference Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations

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By the 1920s, the number of black female law students was sufficiently large at black law schools to support legal sororities to further their professional development. In 1921, black female law students at Howard founded Epsilon Sigma Iota, the nation's first black legal sorority. It was incorporated by Ollie May Cooper, Bertha C. McNeill, and Gladys E. Tignor, who were upper-level students at the law school. The sorority functioned as the only social and legal association for black women law students and lawyers for almost two decades. There were even pledges from black women who were law students at the Robert H. Terrell Law School to establish a chapter of Epsilon Sigma Iota at their law school, or to be considered for membership in the Howard Chapter. However, before a decision could be made about whether Epsilon Sigma Iota should admit non-Howard students, Gamma Delta Epsilon was formed in 1937 at Terrell Law School, with the commitment to forge bonds among all black women lawyers. Ollie May Cooper, one of the founding members of Epsilon Sigma Iota, was a leader in both legal sororities.

Epsilon Sigma Iota and a growing number of local black professional associations, such as the John M. Harlan Law Club of Ohio and the Cook County Bar Association of Illinois, predated the founding in 1925 of the National Bar Association, which became a beacon for this second wave of African American women lawyers. Before 1943, the American Bar Association and local bar associations generally excluded African Americans from membership and therefore limited their access to professional opportunities and social networks. The National Bar Association, which was cofounded by Gertrude Durden Rush, a black woman lawyer who was admitted to practice in Iowa in 1918, was specifically committed to organizing black lawyers nationally and providing them with the networks necessary for professional development and advancement.

In addition to producing African American women lawyers, black law schools were also instrumental in black women's advancement in the legal profession. Ollie May Cooper, who graduated from Howard Law School in 1921, was a member of Howard's law faculty from 1925 to 1930. Before joining the law faculty she served as secretary to the dean of Howard's law school. Jane M. Lucas began teaching at Howard in 1946, making her its second black woman law faculty member. She taught contracts, bills and notes, and legal bibliography until she resigned in 1951. She was followed in 1956 by Cynthia Starker, who taught legal bibliography and insurance and was also a law librarian. The Robert H. Terrell Law School, a black law school named after one of the first African American judges in the District of Columbia, the husband of the club woman Mary Church Terrell, was founded in the District of Columbia in 1931. It was in direct competition with Howard Law School and, like Howard, did not exclude women as students or as members of its faculty. Indeed, Helen Elsie Austin, who was a 1939 graduate of the University of Cincinnati Law School, became the third black woman in the nation to teach law when she was appointed to the Robert H. Terrell Law School faculty in 1941. She was followed by Marjorie Lawson, who taught labor law for one year in 1943, and Margaret A. Haywood, who taught personal property, wills and administration, and insurance law before the law school closed its doors in 1945.

Black women lawyers of this generation had more opportunities for practice than their sisters in the late nineteenth century. Some were fortunate enough to have had fathers or husbands whose firms they could join. Many black women lawyers of this generation secured early opportunities for active practice through a professional association with their fathers or husbands who were lawyers. In the 1930s and 1940s, many lawyer wives, such as Marjorie MacKenzie Lawson of Washington; Elizabeth F. Allen of South Bend, Indiana; Margaret B. Wilson of St. Louis; Alice Huggins of Chicago; Sadie Tanner Alexander of Philadelphia; Edith Sampson Clayton; and Jane Matilda Bolin formed legal partnerships with their lawyer husbands. However, most of the black firms formed during the first half of the twentieth century were financially precarious and short-lived.

Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander and Jane Matilda Bolin are two distinguished practitioners who secured early opportunities for active practice with their husbands. Sadie Alexander, who was born in 1898 into one of Philadelphia's old elite black families, became the first African American woman to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1927. Her father, Aaron Mossell, was the law school's first black graduate, but Alexander obtained her early legal practice through her professional association with her lawyer husband, Raymond Pace Alexander, in whose firm she practiced for thirty-two years beginning in 1927. She specialized in trusts and estate, which was typical of the kind of work accessible to women lawyers. Although her opportunities for court practice were limited, Alexander established a successful practice among Philadelphia's black residents and built a reputation for professionalism and effectively practicing law. Like Sadie Alexander, Jane Matilda Bolin was born into an upper-middle-class professional black family in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1908, where her father, Gaius Charles Bolin, was a successful lawyer in the mostly white town. She practiced with him for a year immediately following her graduation from Yale Law School in 1931, and she later practiced with her husband, Ralph Mizelle, in New York City for five years before the firm of Bolin and Mizelle dissolved. There were a few black women lawyers, such as Ruth Whitehead Whaley, who were successful sole practitioners. Whaley obtained her law degree from Fordham University School of Law in 1924, and between the late 1940s and early 1950s had established such a successful practice that when she ended her practice in New York City she referred an impressive caseload to Pauli Murray.

For many black women lawyers of this generation, jobs in government offered greater opportunities for legal practice. The exodus of men from the civilian labor force during World War II opened up short-lived opportunities for more women to attend law schools and to secure employment in private practice as well as with the government. In 1947 over 50 percent of black women lawyers worked in government agencies, social service, or civil liberties organizations. When race and gender prejudices made actual practice too precarious, these jobs offered greater security. Many served as assistant attorneys general, while others established successful careers in the offices of the solicitors general, the corporation counsel, and the district attorney. Violette Neatly Anderson, who graduated from the Chicago Law School in 1920 and was admitted to practice law in Illinois, became the first woman of any race to serve as assistant city prosecutor in Chicago from 1922 to 1923. She later served as vice-president of the Cook County Bar Association and became the first black woman admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court. Eunice Hunton Carter, a 1932 graduate of Fordham Law School, was an assistant district attorney in New York City who was instrumental in the successful investigation and prosecution of the biggest organized crime case in the nation's history. Working with New York County District Attorney William C. Dodge, then with Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, Carter exposed the racketeering that flourished in New York City and the corruption of the magistrate's court to which she was assigned. In recognition, she was appointed the assistant district attorney in charge of the Court of Special Sessions, where she supervised more than fourteen thousand criminal cases each year. Jane Bolin, who first practiced with her husband, sought government employment after their law practice faltered. She was appointed in 1937 to the Office of the Corporation Counsel of New York Law Department with an assignment to the City's Domestic Relations Court, where she served for two years.

A number of black women pursued advanced degrees in the law. This route was an alternative to immediate practice after law school, or maybe an investment in securing an edge in the job market. Edith Spurlock Sampson returned in 1927 for her master of laws degree at Loyola Law School after graduating from John Marshall Law School in 1925. Sampson quickly moved into a series of positions in the juvenile court, serving first as a probation officer and then as referee—a quasi-judicial post where she heard preliminary evidence in pending cases. In the 1930s, she opened her own office and practiced there part-time, specializing in divorce work. By 1943, she had resigned her juvenile court post for full-time private practice. She returned to the government as a salaried trial lawyer in 1947 and secured a position as an assistant state's attorney. In the mid-1950s, Sampson moved on to a post in the Chicago Corporation Counsel's Office, and she rounded out her career by winning elections for municipal court judge, and later for circuit judge, in the 1960s. Pauli Murray, a 1944 graduate of Howard Law School and one of the first black women to apply to and be rejected by the Harvard Law School graduate program, obtained a master of laws degree from Boalt Hall, and years later, in 1965, a doctor of juridical science from Yale Law School. In 1946, Murray worked as an assistant attorney general of the state of California before establishing a private practice in New York City in the 1950s. She would turn in her shingle for a robe in 1977 and become one of three women first ordained as priest in the Episcopal Church. Goler Teal Butcher received a master of laws in international law in 1958 from the University of Pennsylvania, and became the first black woman to clerk in the federal system when she clerked for Circuit Court Judge William Henry Hastie Sr. Following her clerkship with Hastie, she established a successful private practice.

For many black women lawyers of this generation, a law degree was often a ticket to high-level staff positions in the domestic relations and juvenile courts, which brought increased prestige and professional contacts that allowed them to move into private practice or government positions, which in turn opened up further opportunities for professional advancement. This circuitous route to the black woman lawyer's active practice of law shows the serious impediments to her full equality within the profession. Despite their more than fifty years at the bar, black women lawyers had gained only a tenuous foothold in the legal profession, but nonetheless a foothold that would be strengthened by succeeding generations.

Post–Civil Rights Years, 1965–Present

With the civil rights movement it became increasingly clear that this post-1965 generation of African American women lawyers would not take so circuitous a route to full practice in the profession. In the 1950s, many black women lawyers were actively involved in the civil rights movement. Constance Baker Motley, who later became the first black woman to sit on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, joined the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in 1946 right after graduation from Columbia Law School, and years later became its principal trial lawyer in its fight to end segregation. She argued ten cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and won nine of them, helping to lay the foundation for the NAACP's successful dismantling of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of “separate but equal.” Althea Simmons, a 1956 graduate of Howard Law School, dedicated her life to civil rights. She organized voting rights drives and became the chief lobbyist for the NAACP in 1979, testifying before Congress on issues of civil rights. Other black women lawyers, such as Ruth Harvey Charity, a graduate of Howard Law School and former president of the National Association of Black Women Attorneys, incorporated activism into their practice. Ruth Harvey Charity filed suits and organized sit-ins against the segregation of libraries and other public places in Danville, Virginia. She also defended civil rights marchers and protesters, and in 1963 successfully defended 1,300 civil rights demonstrators in Danville.

There were black women lawyers such as Eleanor Holmes Norton, Marian Wright Edelman, Mary Frances Berry, and Frankie Muse Freeman, who became professional legal advocates in the African American fight for civil rights. A 1964 Yale Law School graduate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, began as a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union in 1965 after clerking for Judge A. Leon Higginbotham of the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia. Norton then became the first woman to head the New York City Commission of Human Rights in 1970 before being appointed chair of the Federal Equal Employment Opportunities Commission by President Jimmy Carter in 1977. Marian Wright Edelman, who graduated from Yale Law School a year before Norton in 1963, began her legal career as a staff attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which she later directed for several years before she became president of the Children's Legal Defense Fund in 1973. Much like Norton and Edelman, Mary Frances Berry concentrated on public service areas. A 1970 University of Michigan law graduate, Berry served as assistant secretary of education under President Carter and in 1980 became a member of the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights, a post first held by a woman in 1964 when President Lyndon Johnson nominated Frankie Muse Freeman. Ever vigilant in the fight to protect theconstitutional rights of all American citizens, Berry became actively involved in the commission to investigate allegations of black disfranchisement in Florida during the 2000 presidential election.

The careers of Ambassador Patricia Roberts Harris and the former congresswoman from Texas Barbara Jordan broke a number of barriers in the early 1970s and painted an impressive picture of the African American woman lawyer in politics. Patricia Roberts Harris, who graduated first in her class at George Washington University Law School, was appointed ambassador to Luxembourg by President Johnson and U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development by President Carter in 1977, and served as U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare until 1982. Barbara Jordan, a native of Houston, graduated from Boston University Law School in 1959 and returned to Houston, where her first political appointment was as an administrative assistant to the county judge of Harris County. She was then elected to the state senate in 1966 and to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1972. As a congresswoman, Jordan was an advocate for the poor and disadvantaged of the nation, promoting bills such as the Workman's Compensation Act to maximize benefits to injured workers. But Jordan is best remembered for the position she took and the eloquent speech she made during the impeachment hearing of President Richard Nixon in 1974 while she served on the House Judiciary Committee. She captured the nation's respect and went on to be the keynote speaker for the Democratic National Convention in 1976 and 1992.

Opportunities for black women to teach at white law schools remained almost nonexistent in the 1970s. Jean Camper Cahn, who taught at Howard for a year, became the first black woman to teach at a white law school, when she joined the faculty of George Washington University School of Law in 1968. She was a visiting professor during the time she spent at the law school and director of the Urban Law Institute at George Washington's law school from 1968 to 1971. She taught law and poverty, jurisprudence, international law, federal programs, police and community, and community organization, but she was never offered a teaching position on tenure track at George Washington's law school, which led to her resignation. At the time that she left, she was the only black professor on the law school faculty. This was typical for most black women teaching at white law schools, but in 1971, Joyce Anne Hughes became the first black woman to teach on tenure track at a white law school when she joined the law faculty at the University of Minnesota's law school after spending her early career clerking for U.S. District Judge Earl R. Larson and working in a major law firm in Minneapolis. She was also the first African American woman to graduate from and to instruct at the University of Minnesota's law school, where she taught practice, modern real estate, and the legal profession. She continued teaching at the University of Minnesota until 1975, when she joined the law faculty at Northwestern University, where she taught banking, evidence, immigration, and real estate transactions. In 1988, Lani Guinier, who graduated from Yale Law School in 1974, joined the law faculty at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and in 1998 when she joined the faculty of Harvard Law School she became the law school's first black tenured professor.

The Judiciary

Black women's legacy in the judiciary spans fifty-five years, and began with Jane Matilda Bolin, a 1931 Yale Law School graduate, who became the nation's first black woman judge in 1939 when Mayor Fiorello La Guardia appointed her to New York's Domestic Relations Court for a ten-year term. She was reappointed for consecutive ten-year terms by mayors O'Dwyer, Wagner, and Lindsay, but remained the sole black woman judge in the nation for twenty years. In 1950, Hannah Elizabeth Byrd of Philadelphia, though not a lawyer, served in the judiciary as a magistrate. Byrd had established an enviable reputation for herself, working with community organizations and professional women's groups, when Governor James Duff appointed her to complete her deceased husband's term as a magistrate. The first black woman magistrate in Pennsylvania, Byrd served with distinction for two years, but it was not until 1959 that the nation had its second African American woman on the bench. Juanita Kidd Stout, a 1948 graduate of Indiana University Law School, was first appointed to finish the term of a deceased judge in 1959. When the term ended in two months, Stout was elected as a Philadelphia county court judge in 1960 to a ten-year term and became the first African American woman elected to a court in the United States. Stout was reelected for consecutive terms and was appointed to the state supreme court in 1988, making her the first black woman to serve on a state supreme court. She retired in 1989, but subsequently served as a senior judge in the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia. These early judicial pioneers entered the judiciary by appointment, whether mayoral or gubernatorial. Prior to their judicial appointments they served in government positions in the office of the corporation counsel or district attorney. Judge Bolin had been an assistant corporation counsel in the Domestic Relations Court for two years when she was appointed a judge in that court. A few years before her 1959 judicial appointment, Judge Stout had served in the district attorney's office.

Many female African American judges were appointed, and many more were elected, as the 1960s and 1970s ushered in a more enfranchised black community in the United States. By 1972 there were twenty-three black women judges in the United States, with four in New York City; three each in Chicago and Washington, DC; two each in Atlanta, Cleveland, and Philadelphia; and one each in Detroit, Greensboro (North Carolina), Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Omaha, Portland (Oregon), and Sparta (Georgia).

In 1961, Vaino Hassen Spencer, a 1952 law graduate of Southwestern School of Law, was appointed as a municipal court judge in Los Angeles, the first such appointment in Los Angeles. Marjorie McKenzie Lawson's appointment to the DC Juvenile Court by President John F. Kennedy in 1962 made her the first black woman ever appointed to a judicial post by a United States president and approved by the Senate for a statutory appointment. She had earned law degrees from Terrell Law School and Columbia University and was engaged in private practice with her husband, Belford Lawson, prior to her judicial appointment. Edith Spurlock Sampson, who was elected an associate judge of Chicago's Municipal Court in 1962 and a judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County in Chicago, was a 1925 graduate of John Marshall Law School. She had been a referee of the Cook County Juvenile Court from 1930 to 1947 when she was appointed an assistant state's attorney, and in 1950 she was made an alternate delegate to the United Nations General Assembly by President Harry S. Truman. From 1955 to her election to the Municipal Court in 1962, she worked as an assistant corporation counsel for the City of Chicago. Of singular judicial achievement during this period was Constance Baker Motley, who became the first black woman in the federal judiciary when President Johnson appointed her to the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York in 1966. A 1946 Columbia University Law School graduate, she had had a very impressive legal and political career before her judgeship, serving with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 1946 to 1963 and serving in the New York Senate and as Manhattan borough president.

Whereas some African American women chose to remain in the court of first appointment, Consuelo Bland Marshall, a 1961 Howard Law School graduate, served in a variety of jurisdictions over a ten-year period. She first became a judge in 1971 after working as a city attorney in Los Angeles from 1962 to 1967. She first served as a judge in the Juvenile Court in Los Angeles, before serving as a judge on the Inglewood Municipal Court, Los Angeles County, and on the Criminal Court, for the Superior Court of California, Los Angeles County. But the plum position came in 1980 when President Carter appointed Judge Marshall to the United States District Court, where she became one of the few black women serving on this court in the nation. Black women's presence in the local, state, and federal judiciary was first secured by political appointments, which later combined with elections to gradually increase their numbers, which were never in keeping with the gains made by their black male and white female counterparts.

Closing Statements

Black women first entered the legal profession in 1872 with few prospects for law-related employment. The generations that followed benefited from an African American community that was ushered in by the Great Migration and by salaried positions in government. Half a century later, in 1939, black women lawyers entered the judiciary by appointment. After more than a century at the bar black women lawyers continue to achieve many firsts in a profession defined by a culture of exclusion. The president ofthe National Bar Association in 1996, Keith Waters, declared that affirmative action has failed black women inthe legal profession and added that the percentage of lawyers in the United States who are black women has remained the same since the 1960s. Although African American women lawyers are no longer an anomaly in the profession, they continue to struggle against prejudices and discrimination that aim to relegate them to the bottom rungs of the professional hierarchy.

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