Jane Matilda Bolin

Judge and lawyer

• Born: April 11, 1908
• Birthplace: Poughkeepsie, New York
• Died: January 8, 2007
• Place of death: Long Island City, Queens, New York

Bolin was the first African American woman in the history of the United States to serve as a judge, as well as the first African American woman member of the New York City Bar Association and the first African American to serve as a New York City assistant corporation counsel. She was on the bench of New York family court for forty years.

Early Life

Jane Matilda Bolin (BOH-lihn) was the youngest of four children of Gaius Charles Bolin and Matilda Ingram Emery Bolin. Her father was of mixed African American and Native American ancestry and was the first African American graduate of Williams College. Gaius became a prominent Poughkeepsie lawyer and the president of the Dutchess County Bar Association. He also was a civil rights activist who was instrumental in establishing a Dutchess County chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1931. Jane Bolin’s mother, Matilda, was a white woman from England who died when Bolin was only eight years old.

Bolin grew up in comfortable circumstances but still was affected by a legacy of racism. She was profoundly affected by articles and photographs of lynchings in The Crisis, the publication of the NAACP. She became determined to make a contribution to social justice in her life. She graduated from Poughkeepsie High School in 1924 and attended Wellesley College, the prestigious Massachusetts college for women, where she was one of only two African Americans in her class. Although Bolin bristled at the discrimination she felt in college, she also excelled academically. As one of the highest-performing students in the class, Bolin was named a Wellesley scholar. In 1928, she enrolled in Yale Law School, the only African American student and one of only three women in her class. In 1931, she became the first African American woman to graduate from Yale Law School.

Life’s Work

Bolin continued to break down barriers throughout her legal career. She joined her father’s law firm. In 1933, she married another African American lawyer, Ralph Mizelle, and they moved to were chosen to further their legal careers. Bolin became the first African American woman member of the New York City Bar Association. In 1937, she was lost a bid for the Nineteenth District seat in the New York State Assembly. However, she did receive a prized appointment in New York’s Office of Corporation Counsel, which serves as New York City’s legal department. Bolin was the first African American to serve in that position. On July 22, 1939, New York’s mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, appointed her as a judge to New York’s Domestic Relations Court, with a ten-year term. She was the first African American woman in the history of the United States to serve as a judge.

Bolin’s son, Yorke Bolin Mizelle, was born in 1941. Two years later, her husband, Ralph, died. In 1950, she married the Reverend Walter Offutt, Jr. She served as a judge of the renamed New York City Family Court for three additional ten-year terms, until her mandatory retirement at age seventy in 1978. During her forty years on the bench, Bolin was widely respected for her dignified bearing, her sympathy for many of the unfortunate people who appeared in her courtroom, and the content of her decision-making. In particular, she made an important impact in eliminating certain racial practices in family court procedures. It was the custom for probation officers to be assigned cases on a strictly racial basis; for example, African American officers were assigned to African American probationers, and Puerto Rican officers to Puerto Rican probationers. Bolin lobbied for probation officers to be assigned without reference to race. Also, New York child-care agencies routinely made adoption and custody decisions with race as a paramount factor, a pernicious practice that seemed to place racial politics above concern for children’s welfare. Bolin was appalled by the practice. With the help of judges Justine Polier and Hubert Delaney, she helped institute a requirement that any private child-care agency receiving public funds had to accept and place children without regard to ethnicity or race.

Bolin was active in civil rights organizations but had a significant parting of ways with the NAACP. Bolin became active in the New York branch of the NAACP as soon as she moved to New York City. In 1937, she was elected first vice president of the branch. In 1943, she became a member of the national board of directors of the organization. She firmly believed that the lifeblood of the NAACP was in the local branches and resented what she saw as high-handed treatment of the chapter by the national leadership. She opposed other board members and especially Executive SecretaryRoy Wilkins on administrative and membership matters.

In 1947, Bolin was voted off the national board despite her stature in the community. In response, the New York and Jamaica branches circulated a petition to restore Bolin, a campaign that made national news in the African American community and embarrassed the NAACP. Despite efforts by the board to repair the breach, Bolin resigned from the national organization in a scathing open letter to NAACP President Arthur Spingarn on March 9, 1950, in which she criticized the highly paid central staff of the NAACP for placing their own interests above those of the local branches. She wrote in that letter: “An authoritative set-up, whether Fascist, Communist, or NAACP, is abhorrent.” In the African American community, Bolin was both criticized for exposing the NAACP to outside rebuke and praised for her commitment to participatory democracy.

Bolin lived in Long Island City, Queens. She died at the age of ninety-eight.

Significance

Bolin’s life should be viewed as more than a collection of firsts, however impressive they may be: first African American woman member of the New York City Bar Association, first African American assistant corporation counsel in New York City, and first African American female judge in the United States. She served on the bench for forty years and was considered a model of compassion and judicial integrity. Perhaps because of her own diverse ancestry, she helped reform several antediluvian practices of the New York court in racial matters. Her inherent sympathy for grassroots efforts led her into conflict with the national board of the NAACP. Although she did not differ in ultimate goals, she resented what she saw as the high-handed and self-important attitude of the board, and believed that by standing up for local NAACP branches, she was contributing to a spirit of authentic liberty and anti-authoritarianism.

Bibliography

Biondi, Martha. To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Post-war New York City. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. Biondi’s account of the pioneering work of northern civil rights activists includes Bolin’s efforts on the bench and her battle with the NAACP leadership.

Jeffers, H. Paul. The Napoleon of New York: Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2002. Portrait of one of New York’s most important and flamboyant mayors. Writes of La Guardia’s appointment of Bolin to the bench as evidence of his sincere efforts to assist the African American community.

McLeod, Jacqueline. “Persona Non-Grata: Judge Jane Matilda Bolin and the NAACP, 1930-1950.” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 29, no. 1 (January, 2005). Based on archival sources, an account of Bolin’s public rupture with the NAACP leadership. McLeod sees Bolin’s spirited resistance as highlighting the recurring dilemma of an activist who believes in the goals of an organization but disagrees with its methods.

Ross, Richard. A Day in Part 15: Law and Order in Family Court. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997. A day in the life of New York City Family Court, from the perspective of a family court judge handling fifty-seven cases.