Judge Jane Bolin, first black woman to occupy a court bench, pictured in 1942. Credit: US Office of War Information/Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons.
“I stand on the shoulders of many who have come before me,” Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson declared in her opening statement at her confirmation hearing to potentially become the first Black woman Supreme Court justice. She did not mention Judge Jane Bolin by name. But Bolin truly was a pioneering “first” of many firsts.
Bolin’s historic journey began in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she was born in 1908 as the youngest of four children. He father, Gaius C. Bolin, practiced law for 50 years, eventually becoming the Dutchess County Bar Association’s first Black president. Her mother, from Northern Ireland, died when she was just eight, leaving her to a focused Black cultural bond with her father and his voluminous law books.
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