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.

 

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. 

 

 

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.  

 

 

 

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.

 

“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.

 

 

 

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.