Nation's 1st black woman judge
Jane Bolin also was pioneer at Yale Law, New York Bar Association.
By Douglas Martin, The New York Times
NEW YORK - Jane Bolin, whose appointment as a family court judge by Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia in 1939 made her the first black woman in the United States to become a judge, died on Monday in Queens. She was 98 and lived in Long Island City, Queens.
Her death was announced by her son, Yorke B. Mizelle.
Bolin was the first black woman to graduate from Yale Law School, the first to join the New York City Bar Association, and the first to work in the office of the New York City corporation counsel, the city's legal department.
In January 1979, when Bolin had reluctantly retired after 40 years as a judge, Constance Baker Motley, a black woman and a federal judge, called her a role model.
In her speech, Motley said, "When I thereafter met you, I then knew how a lady judge should comport herself."
The "lady judge" was frequently in the news at the time of her appointment with accounts of her regal bearing, fashionable hats and pearls. But her achievements transcended being a shining example. As a family court judge, she ended the assignment of probation officers on the basis of race and the placement of children in child-care agencies on the basis of ethnic background.
Bolin was born on April 11, 1908, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Her father, Gaius C. Bolin, was the son of an American Indian woman and an African-American man. Her mother, the former Matilda Emery, was a white Englishwoman.
Jane Gaius Bolin, who was the first black graduate of Williams College, had his own legal practice and was president of the Dutchess County Bar Association. His daughter grew up enamored of his shelves of leather-bound books on the law. But her comfortable girlhood was profoundly shaken by articles and pictures of lynchings in Crisis magazine, the official publication of the NAACP.
"It is easy to imagine how a young, protected child who sees portrayals of brutality is forever scarred and becomes determined to contribute in her own small way to social justice," she wrote at the time of her retirement in December 1978.
She attended Wellesley College, where she was one of two black freshmen. They were assigned to the same room in a family's apartment off campus, the first instance of many episodes of discrimination.
At her graduation in 1928, she was named a Wellesley Scholar, a distinction given to the top 20 students of the class. When she broached the subject of a law career to a guidance counselor, she was told that black women had little chance. Her father also discouraged her at first.
At Yale Law School, Bolin was one of three women in her class and the only black person.
In an interview with The New York Times in 1993, she said that a few Southerners at the law school had taken pleasure in letting the swinging classroom doors hit her in the face. One of those Southerners later became active in the American Bar Association and invited her to speak before his bar group in Texas. She declined.
After graduation, she practiced for a short time with her father in Poughkeepsie. She then married a lawyer, Ralph E. Mizelle, and the two practiced in New York. He died in 1943. In 1950, she married Walter P. Offutt Jr., a minister; he died in 1974. In addition to her son, she is survived by a granddaughter and a great-granddaughter.
In 1937, six years after her Yale graduation, she applied for a position in the New York City corporation counsel's office. An assistant there was initially dismissive, but the counsel, Paul Windell, hired her on the spot. She was assigned to Domestic Relations Court, renamed Family Court in 1962.
On July 22, 1939, she was told that La Guardia wanted to see her. She worried that she was going to be reprimanded. Instead, she was sworn in as a judge. The ceremony made news around the world. In an interview with The New York World-Telegram the next day, she said she hoped to show "a broad sympathy for human suffering," adding, "I'll see enough of it."
In 1958, speaking on women's rights, she said, "We have to fight every inch of the way and in the face of sometimes insufferable humiliations."
