August 6, 2021
Hello ,
"There are Negro and Jewish and Catholic, Japanese and Indian youngsters who dream the same dreams I once did and who shoot [for] the same stars.
What will you make democracy mean to them? America, which has reached its present stature only by the contributions of its various minority groups, can it afford not to utilize the abilities and aptitudes of these citizens.
Can America stand this human waste?"
Exchange those modifiers with Black, Muslim, Latinx, Asian and Indigenous and the question asked a lifetime ago still stands.
Here's the good news. The New York Times is reporting America's poverty rate is projected to fall by 45-percent this year. This staggering statistic is largely due to the Biden Administration's covid relief package, [great graph in this
article] but we all know how tenuous the political situation remains.
Today's feature story introduces us to the woman I quoted above, Jane Bolin, who dedicated her 40-year career to the well-being of children and families. She paid little attention to the history she was making as the first Black woman judge.
Jane Bolin: Pioneering Black Lawyer & Advocate for Children
In 1939, Jane Bolin was appointed to the bench in New York City's Domestic Relations Court where she served for 40 years.
The highlights of her career included a ruling that probation officers be assigned fairly regardless of race or religion, and another making it illegal for private childcare centers receiving public funding to refuse children due to race or ethnicity.
Judge Jane Bolin in her official robes in 1978, photo courtesy John Sotomayor/The New York Times.
In 1931, with segregation prevalent throughout the country, Jane Bolin became the first Black woman to graduate from Yale Law School, where racist students thought it good fun to slam doors in her face.
Prior, she attended Wellesley College, one of only two black women, who were forced to move off campus to escape meanness by other students at the elite women's school. Vassar College in her hometown of Poughkeepsie, NY refused to enroll black students at all.
Though black and female, Jane armed herself with her degrees, ambition and desire to do good and moved to New York City. She became the first black woman to join the New York City Bar Association, and the first to work in the city’s legal department.
“Everyone else makes a fuss about [all these firsts], but I didn’t think about it, and I still don’t,” she told the New York Times in a 1993 interview. “I wasn’t concerned about first, second or last. My work was my primary concern.”
Judy Bolin at home in 1939, courtesy Associated Press.
After Jane's white mother died, she was raised by her father, Lawyer Gaius C. Bolin, spending hour in his office. “Those leather-bound books just intrigued me,” Bolin later recalled.
Outside the safety of her father's office, Jane stood out as a biracial childing her primarily white hometown, stared at by neighbors and shut out of some local businesses. Reading material in her home, Crisis Magazine, carried news of the lynchings of Black Americans across the Jim Crow south.
“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,” Bolin said later.
Arriving in New York City to look for a job, Jane needed all her determination to move ahead against the continuing slaps to the face.
“I was rejected on account of being a woman, but I’m sure that race also played a part,” she said. “The reception I got was very, very businesslike, and I was disposed of rather rapidly.”
Ironically, Jane's father had been first to discourage her career aspirations. “He was very opposed to the idea at first,” Bolin later said. “He assumed I’d be a schoolteacher. He didn’t think that women should hear the unpleasant things that lawyers have to hear.” Or be exposed to the “grossest kind of human behavior.” Her school guidance counselor had also advised Jane not to
try and become a lawyer.
When Jane couldn't get a job, she started her own law firm with her husband Ralph Mizelle, and within five years was hired in New York City's corporation counsel office. Jane had worked there two years, when she received a cryptic message from City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, telling her to meet him at the World’s Fair.
“I was very apprehensive,” Jane remembered, thinking that she would be reprimanded for something. “I couldn’t think of anything that I had done.”
She met LaGuardia at the appropriate time and place, and with little ado, told her “I’m going to make you a judge. Raise your right hand.”
Jane Bolin with husband Ralph Mizelle and NYC Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, July, 1939, courtesy Getty Images.
“I was in a state of shock,” Jane said. “I did what he told me. I raised my right hand.”
Judge Bolin would be reappointed to her seat by three more mayors, for three more ten-year terms, retiring only when forced to by age limits of the job. Throughout her career, she sought to show “a broad sympathy for human suffering.”
For racism, she had no sympathy, and when given the chance to speak to leaders in her hometown in 1944, she minced no words, saying she had no choice but to leave Poughkeepsie if she wanted to "bring to fruition the aspirations and ambitions and dreams I had had from
my childhood...I hate fascism whether it is practiced by Germans, Japanese or by Americans and Poughkeepsie is fascist to the extend of deluding itself that there is superiority among human beings by reason solely of color or race or religion.
The judge told the gathering in Poughkeepsie that those working in field of childcare were alarmed at the billions of dollars spent by government on defense compared to the infinitesimal amount spent on democracy's most priceless asset: children.
The Poughkeepsie New Yorker reported her words to the wider public.
Jane Bolin died in 2007 at the age of 98, leaving us not only a life's work advocating for children and families and a model for dedicated public service, but a solid path for black women who want to work in the legal system today.
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/bolin-jane-1908-2007/
https://allthatsinteresting.com/jane-bolin
https://www.essence.com/feature/jane-bolin-first-black-woman-judge-history/
https://dchsny.org/bolins-on-race/
Lots of great news!
Terrific story in TIME on Major Charity Adams and the 6888th Postal Directory Battalion and the effort to award those Women's Army Corps members a Congressional Gold Medal.
“The women of the 6888th were under an incredible spotlight,” Beth Ann Koelsch, curator of the Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro commented. Their greatest legacy “was in changing the perception of the capabilities of women of color. Their success challenged the stereotype of African-American women.”
And of course, you can read the whole story of these women in my book Standing Up Against Hate. Stay tuned! Next week I hope to have some exciting news about a film version of the book!
Below...just so you can see how this work on getting a book published goes on forever.
This week I received yet more edits on Close Up on War, the advanced reader copy should be heading to the printers very soon!
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