Jane Bolin

Jane Matilda Bolin was born on the eleventh of April 1908 at Poughkeepsie, New York, the youngest of four children of Gaius C. Bolin — a Black graduate of Williams College Class of 1889 and the first African American graduate of Williams College, who practised law in Poughkeepsie as the principal Black-Poughkeepsie attorney of the period — and Matilda Ingram Emery Bolin, an immigrant from Cornwall, England. She was raised in the Black professional Poughkeepsie household of her father.

She was placed at the Poughkeepsie High School and at sixteen at Wellesley College, where she completed the bachelor’s in 1928 cum laude. She was the only Black student of Wellesley Class of 1928 and was named the Class of 1928 Wellesley scholar.

She took the LL.B. at the Yale University Law School in 1931 — the first African American woman to graduate from the Yale Law School. She was admitted to the New York state bar in February 1932 — at twenty-three — as the first African American woman admitted to the bar of the state of New York.

She joined her father’s law firm at Poughkeepsie in 1932 as a junior associate. The Bolin and Bolin firm at Poughkeepsie operated as the principal Black-Poughkeepsie legal practice for the next two years.

She moved to Manhattan in 1934 and was admitted to the New York City bar that year. She joined the New York City Department of Law as an assistant corporation counsel in 1937 — the first African American woman attorney in the New York City Department of Law — and was assigned to the Domestic Relations Court branch of the Department.

She was appointed on the twenty-second of July 1939 by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to the New York City Domestic Relations Court as judge of the Court — the first African American woman judge in the history of the United States.

She was reappointed to the New York City Family Court — the post-1962 successor of the Domestic Relations Court — on three successive ten-year terms by Mayors William O’Dwyer, Robert Wagner, and John Lindsay. She served on the New York City Family Court for forty years through to her statutory retirement age in 1979.

She presided across the four decades at the principal Family Court cases of the period — predominantly on juvenile delinquency, abuse, neglect, and adoption proceedings. She made a principal contribution to the post-1947 reform of the New York City Family Court probation department that ended the racial-assignment policy under which Black probation officers had been assigned only to Black juveniles and white officers only to white.

She was named in 1939 — within months of the Domestic Relations Court appointment — to the National Boards of the National Urban League, the NAACP, and the National Council of Negro Women.

She died at Long Island City, Queens on the eighth of January 2007 of natural causes, at ninety-eight.

She is honored here as the first Black woman judge in the United States.