Cora T. Walker

Cora Theodora Walker was born on the twentieth of February 1922 at Charlotte, North Carolina, the daughter of an undertaker of the Charlotte funeral-and-burial society network and a homemaker of the Charlotte Black middle class. The family moved to Harlem in 1930 in his trade and in the principal Black-Charlotte-to-Harlem migration network of the inter-war period.

She was placed at the Harlem Public Schools and at the Wadleigh High School for Girls at Manhattan, and at sixteen entered the New York University Washington Square College. She took the bachelor’s at New York University in 1942.

She took the LL.B. at the St. John’s University School of Law at Manhattan in 1945 — among the first Black women to graduate from the institution.

She was admitted in February 1946 to the bar of the state of New York — the first African American woman admitted to the bar of the state of New York.

She opened a private legal practice at the Harlem 125th Street and Lenox Avenue corner in 1946 — the principal Black-Harlem woman-owned legal practice of the post-war period. She operated the practice for the following sixty years through to her death in 2006.

She co-founded in 1955 the Harlem Lawyers’ Association at New York — the principal Black-Harlem lawyers’ professional organisation of the post-war period — with the Manhattan attorneys Constance Baker Motley (placed in this archive), Bertram L. Baker, and the principal Harlem civil-rights attorneys of the period. She served as the Association’s first secretary from 1955 to 1962.

She was named in 1960 the principal counsel of the Harlem-River-Drive Tenant-Association Plaintiffs at the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development title-7 desegregation case United States v. New York City Housing Authority — the first systematic federal desegregation lawsuit on the racial pattern of the New York City public-housing programme. The case settled at the federal level in November 1962 under a Department of Housing and Urban Development consent decree that integrated the principal Harlem-River-Drive public-housing complexes.

She served as the principal legal counsel of the Riverbend Houses tenant cooperative at Harlem from 1960 to 1985 — the principal Black-owned tenant-cooperative at Harlem of the post-war period and the principal limited-equity housing cooperative of the New York Mitchell-Lama programme.

She was the principal organiser of the 1968 Harlem Citizens’ Committee for Welfare Reform — the principal Black-Harlem welfare-rights organising body of the closing 1960s — and the principal counsel of the New York City Welfare Department–Harlem-Citizens federal-court welfare-rights litigation of the period.

She served the State of New York as a member of the State Human Rights Appeal Board from 1968 to 1974 — among the first Black women on a New York state government appeals board.

She was elected in 1980 the first African American woman of the New York City Board of Elections.

She died at Manhattan on the twenty-fourth of August 2006 of natural causes, at eighty-four.

She is honored here as the first Black woman admitted to the New York bar.