Edith Sampson

Edith Spurlock was born on the thirteenth of October 1901 at Pittsburgh, the eldest of six children of Louis Spurlock — a Black shipping clerk of the Pittsburgh Pennsylvania Railroad — and Elizabeth McGruder Spurlock, a domestic. She was raised in the small Black community of working-class Pittsburgh of the early twentieth century.

She was placed at six at the Watt Street Elementary School at Pittsburgh and at the Peabody High School at the East End of Pittsburgh. She took the bachelor’s at the Pittsburgh New York School of Social Work in 1925 — among the early Black graduates of the institution.

She took the LL.B. at the John Marshall Law School at Chicago in 1925 in the same year as the bachelor’s — the only female graduate of her John Marshall Law School class — and was admitted to the Illinois state bar in 1927. She took the master’s in laws at the Loyola University Chicago Law School in 1927 — the first African American woman to receive an LL.M. from any American law school.

She opened a private practice at Chicago in 1925 and operated the principal Black-Chicago private legal practice of the late 1920s and 1930s.

She served from 1929 to 1934 the Cook County Juvenile Court at Chicago as a probation officer — the principal Black-Chicago juvenile-court probation-officer position of the period — and from 1935 to 1942 the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office as an assistant State’s Attorney.

She was hired in 1946 by the Round-the-World Town Meeting of the Air — the principal post-war American international-affairs radio programme — as the only African American member of a twenty-six-member tour of post-war American thought leaders to the principal Western European, Asian and African capitals.

She was nominated by President Harry S. Truman on the twenty-second of August 1950 as alternate delegate of the United States to the Fifth Session of the United Nations General Assembly. She was the first African American delegate to the United Nations General Assembly in the five-year history of the institution. She served the United States delegation across the Fifth Session at the Lake Success and the Flushing Meadow United Nations headquarters.

She was renamed in 1952 to the United States delegation to the Sixth Session of the General Assembly at Paris.

She was named in 1961 the principal United States representative to the United Nations Economic and Social Council Commission on Human Rights at Geneva.

She was elected on the sixth of November 1962 an associate judge of the Cook County Municipal Court at Chicago — the first African American woman to be elected an associate judge at any United States municipal court — and to the Cook County Circuit Court at the merger of the Circuit and the Municipal Courts in 1964. She served the Circuit Court for fifteen years through to her retirement in 1978.

She died at Chicago on the eighth of October 1979 of complications of cancer, at seventy-seven.

She is honored here as the first Black delegate to the United Nations General Assembly.