[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 11 (Friday, January 19, 2007)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E155-E156]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




          A TRIBUTE TO JANE BOLIN--THE FIRST BLACK WOMAN JUDGE

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. CHARLES B. RANGEL

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                        Friday, January 19, 2007

  Mr. RANGEL. Madam Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to the life 
and legacy of Jane Bolin, the first African-American judge in the 
United States, who left this world at the age of 98 years and to enter 
into the Record an article in the New York Times by Douglas Martin 
entitled ``Jane Bolin, the Country's First Black Woman to Become a 
Judge, Is Dead at 98.''
  Jane Bolin was born in Poughkeepsie, NY, daughter of the late Gaius 
C. Bolin and the late Matilda Emery. Her father was the first black 
graduate of Williams College, had his own legal practice and was 
president of the Dutchess County Bar Association. She grew up enamored 
of her father's shelves of leather-bound books on the law and went on 
to be the first Black woman to attend Yale Law School, after graduating 
with honors from Wellesley College.
  Bolin was appointed to Domestic Relations Court--now the Family 
Court--of New York in 1939 by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, where she 
served with distinction for 40 years. As judge, two major changes she 
accomplished, along with Judges Justine Wise Polier and Hubert Delaney, 
were the assignment of probation officers to cases without regard for 
race or religion and a requirement that private child care agencies 
that received public funds had to accept children without regard to 
ethnic background.
  Bolin served on the board of the Wiltwyck School for Boys, the Child 
Welfare League of America, the Neighborhood Children's Center, the New 
York State Board of Regents, and took an active role in the local and 
national NAACP. Judge Bolin has received honorary degrees from Morgan 
State University, Western College for Women, Tuskegee Institute, 
Hampton University, and Williams College.
  Even though Jane Bolin passed away on January 8, 2006, her 
contributions to the practice of law brought revolutionary changes to 
New York's legal bureaucracy and her legacy will live through all those 
families she touched throughout her years on the New York family court 
bench.

                       [From The New York Times]

Jane Bolin, the Country's First Black Woman To Become a Judge, Is Dead 
                                 at 98

                          (By Douglas Martin)

       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.
       Judge 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 Judge 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, Judge 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.
       Jane Matilda Bolin was born on April 11, 1908, in 
     Poughkeepsie, NY. 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.
       Mr. 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 N.A.A.C.P.
       ``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 in a letter 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 she said she encountered there.
       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 
     Wellesley guidance counselor, she

[[Page E156]]

     was told that black women had little chance. Her father also 
     discouraged her at first, saying that lawyers had to deal 
     ``with the most unpleasant and sometimes the grossest kind of 
     human behavior.''
       But Mr. Bolin did not know she had already been admitted to 
     Yale Law School, and he eventually agreed to her career 
     choice.
       At Yale, Ms. 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 graduation from Yale, 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, walked into the 
     office and 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 Mayor La Guardia wanted 
     to see her at the New York City building at the World's Fair, 
     which had just opened. 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.''
       Her cases included homicides and other crimes committed by 
     juveniles; nonsupport of wives and children; battered 
     spouses; neglected children; children in need of supervision; 
     adoptions; and paternity suits. She chose not to wear 
     judicial robes in order to make children feel more 
     comfortable.
       She was reappointed to 10-year terms by Mayors William 
     O'Dwyer, Robert F. Wagner Jr. and John V. Lindsay. When she 
     resigned in December 1978 because she had reached the 
     mandatory retirement age of 70, she complained, ``They're 
     kicking me out.''
       After her retirement, she was a volunteer reading 
     instructor in New York City public schools for two years, and 
     was appointed to the Regents Review Committee of the New York 
     State Board of Regents.
       She was outspoken on civil rights issues of many kinds. 
     When she returned to her hometown of Poughkeepsie in 1944 as 
     a judge and something of a local heroine, she pointed out 
     that the city government, schools and hospitals remained 
     segregated.
       ``Poughkeepsie is fascist to the extent of deluding itself 
     that there is superiority among human beings by reasons 
     solely of color, race or religion,'' she said in an interview 
     with The Poughkeepsie New Yorker.
       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.''

                          ____________________