Jane Bolin

Jane Matilda Bolin was born on April 11, 1908, in Poughkeepsie, New York, the youngest of four children of Gaius C. Bolin — the first African American graduate of Williams College (Class of 1889) and a respected attorney who led the Dutchess County Bar Association. Raised in a home of books and quiet resolve, she carried her father's example into a life of firsts.

She graduated from Wellesley College in 1928, ranking near the top of her class, and in 1931 became the first African American woman to earn a law degree from Yale Law School. Admitted to the New York bar in 1932, she went on to become the first Black woman to join the New York City Bar Association and the first to serve in the New York City Law Department as an assistant corporation counsel.

On July 22, 1939, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia appointed the thirty-one-year-old Bolin a judge of the New York City Domestic Relations Court — making her the first African American woman judge in the United States. For twenty years she stood alone in that distinction. Reappointed three times, she served forty years on the bench, later renamed the Family Court, until mandatory retirement at seventy in 1979.

From that seat she worked to end the assignment of probation officers by race and to compel publicly funded childcare agencies to accept children regardless of ethnicity. After retiring, she taught reading in New York's public schools and reviewed cases for the State Board of Regents. Jane Bolin died on January 8, 2007, at ninety-eight. May her steadfast dignity and her quiet breaking of doors be honored for as long as justice is sought.